) cgD cgD eg. ego 

CHRISTIAN 
TEACH mC 



ROBERT 
BROWNING 



FRANK- CLOCKWOOD 




Gopyii^htN^. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




/tcrf^i^ ^^krurTt^fH^ ^ 



MODERN POETS 



AND 



CHRISTIAN TEACHING 



ROBERT BROWNING 



BY 
FRANK C. LOCKWOOD, 




NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



; > ^ 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 20 ^906 

Caoyrififht Entry 

CUWS <X XXc, No. 

COPY B 



Copyright, 1906, by 
EATON & MAINS. 



THIS BOOK 

IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED 

TO 

MY WIFE 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I. The Man Browning. . - - > - - g 

II. Browning's Way to Truth. - > _ - 33 

III. The Path to God. 50 

IV. The Human Highway. 67 

V. The Upward March of Nature. - - - - gS 

VI. God's Message to Man. _ . - - _ 109 

VII. Browning's Influence. ------ 132 



PREFACE 

The writer's aim in the preparation of this 
book has been a modest one. It has not been 
his purpose to enter into a technical and exhaust- 
ive study of Browning's poetry from either a 
philosophical or an artistic point of view. It has 
been his desire, rather, in as simple and lucid a 
manner as possible to present to serious readers 
a connected account of things fundamental that 
lie deeply bedded in Browning's life and poetry. 
The need of such a work is to be found in the un- 
deniable fact that Browning is frequently difficult 
to understand and in the equally undeniable 
fact that there is much in him that is vastly 
worthy of being understood. It is the author's 
hope that he may, in some small measure, be 
instrumental in revealing to uninitiated or dis- 
co'uraged readers the rich veins of spiritual 
truth that are everywhere to be found in Brown- 
ing's poetry at its best, and thus to impart to 
others what has been of inestimable value to 
himself. 

The reader will find very little in the book out- 
side of the quotations from Browning himself 

7 



8 Preface 

that is either striking or original. The author 
takes pleasure in acknowledging his special obli- 
gation to the following books and authors, though 
there are many others that he has found helpful 
to him in his work: Life and Letters of Robert 
Browning, by Mrs. Sutherland Orr; Brown- 
ing as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher, 
by Professor Henry Jones; Robert Browning, 
by Edward Dowden; The Poetry of Robert 
Browning, by Stopford A. Brooke; Life of Brown- 
ing, by William Sharp; Studies of the Mind 
and Art of Robert Browning, by James Foth- 
eringham; the Essay of Professor Josiah Royce 
on Browning's Theism, in the Boston Browning 
Society Papers, 1 886-1 897, and Robert Brown- 
ing: Personalia, by Edmund Gosse. 

The writer has received no little aid and en- 
couragement from Professor Lincoln R. Gibbs, 
and to him, also, he wishes to express his obliga- 
tion. 

F. C. L. 

Meadville, Pennsylvania. 



CHAPTER I 

THE MAN BROWNING 

Have you found your life distasteful? 

My life did and does smack sweet. 
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? 

Mine I saved and hold complete. 
Do your joys with age diminish? 

When mine fail me, I'll complain. 
Must in death your daylight finish? 

My sun sets to rise again. 

If we would find access to the riches of Brown- 
ing's genius we must first unlock the door of his 
personahty — no easy thing to do. It is a difficult 
matter to read any character; much more that of a 
poet, and most of all that of such a poet as Brown- 
ing. It was Wordsworth who remarked, when 
he first heard of Browning's clandestine marriage: 
"So Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett 
have gone ofF together! Well, I hope they may 
understand each other — nobody else could." 
Difficult as it may be, though, to fix his complex 
and illusive personality, we shall be well repaid 
for making the attempt, for it is impossible to 
study a poet's productions apart from his person- 
ality, or his personality apart from his productions. 

9 



10 Robert Browning 

They are vitally related, and one necessarily 
throws light upon the other. 

There was nothing particularly distinctive of 
the poet in Browning's personal appearance or 
the outward circumstances of his life. There 
was no false glamour about the man; nothing mere- 
tricious or sensational, little that was even ro- 
mantic or exceptional. He was not like Burns, 
afflicted with poverty or swayed by ill-regulated 
passions; nor like the proud, morbid, and willful 
Byron, given over to reckless and dissolute courses; 
nor like the visionary and ill-starred Shelley, con- 
sumed in the feverish pursuit of impossible ideals 
of beauty; nor like Keats, struck down in his young 
manhood with the dreams of his youth unfulfilled. 
He lacked the shyness and the somberness of 
Hawthorne, the picturesqueness and melancholy 
of Tennyson, and the leonine fury, titanic energy, 
and tumultuousness of Landor. His position in 
life was so assured, his fortunes so even, his cir- 
cumstances so above pity and beneath envy, that 
his career seems commonplace rather than excit- 
ing and captivating. He had abundant means, 
devoted friends, untold riches of love, a career of 
his own choosing, long life, and abounding health. 
He was of "those whose blood and judgment are 
so well commingled that they are not a pipe for 
fortune's finger to sound what stop she please." 



The Man Browning ii 

He was neither passion's slave nor yet the cold, 
pallid cynic who neither loves nor strives nor 
dares. He was, in short, a very Horatio of poets: 
"a man that fortune's buffets and rewards had 
ta'en with equal thanks." 

Genealogies interest us little except as they 
touch the lives of men of genius; yet the man of 
genius, since he is the crowning product of his 
race, has small need of tracing a remote or illus- 
trious ancestry. So it was with Browning. The 
luster of the name wanes by degrees through 
father, grandfather, and great-grandfather to be 
lost in the ranks of the sturdy common people 
of England. He was a descendant of an obscure 
South of England Anglo-Saxon family. I do not 
doubt that much of the freshness and vigor so 
characteristic of his genius was due to the fact 
that he came of an unspoiled and hardy race 
that had always remained in close contact with 
the soil, and had thus suffered no waste of ele- 
mental power through luxury or the overre- 
finements of artificial society. His opulence and 
versatility of mind, on the other hand, no doubt 
came from the remote and diverse strains of blood 
that flowed from German, Scotch, and Creole 
sources; for while his paternal grandfather was of 
solid English ancestry his paternal grandmother 
was a Creole, his maternal grandfather a German, 



12 Robert Browning 

and his maternal grandmother a Scotch woman. 
Such a descent certainly provides abundant pos- 
sibilities for strength and ardor, vigor and variety 
of endowment. 

In more than one description of Browning, 
written before he had reached middle life, there 
are flattering references to his personal beauty and 
charm of manner. A friend who had been his 
classmate for a short time when Browning was 
about eighteen years of age writes: "He was then 
a bright, handsome youth, with long black hair 
falling over his shoulders.'' William Sharp, one 
of his biographers, says of him: "Everyone who 
met Browning in those early years of his buoyant 
manhood seems to have been struck by his come- 
liness and simple grace of manner. Macready 
stated that he looked more like a poet than any 
man he had ever met. As a young man he ap- 
pears to have had a certain ivory delicacy of color- 
ing, what an old friend, perhaps somewhat exagger- 
atedly, described to me as an almost flowerlike 
beauty, which passed ere long into a less girlish 
and more robust complexion. He appeared taller 
than he was — for he was not above medium 
height — partly because of his rare grace of move- 
ment and partly from a characteristic high poise 
of the head when listening intently to music or 
conversation." 



The Man Browning 13 

Bayard Taylor's picture of Browning as he ap- 
peared at the age of thirty-nine is one of the most 
precise and satisfying that has heen preserved 
for us: "In a small drawing-room on the first 
floor I met Browning, who received me with great 
cordiality. In his lively, cheerful manner, quick 
voice, and perfect self-possession, he made the 
impression of an American rather than an Eng- 
lishman. He was then, I should judge, about 
thirty-seven years of age, but his dark hair was 
already streaked with gray about the temples. 
His complexion was fair, with perhaps the faint- 
est olive tinge, eyes large, clear, and gray, nose 
strong and well cut, mouth full and rather broad, 
and chin pointed, though not prominent. His 
forehead broadened rapidly upward from the 
outer angle of the eyes, slightly retreating. The 
strong individuality which marks his poetry was 
expressed not only in his face and head but in 
his whole demeanor. He was about the medium 
height, strong in the shoulders but slender at the 
waist, and his movements expressed a combina- 
tion of vigor and elasticity." 

It must be confessed that some of these more 
flattering delineations of Browning are at variance 
with our familiar conception of him as he came 
and went among men in his mature years. From 
all accounts he might easily have been mistaken 



14 Robert Browning 

for a retired sea captain, a successful American 
business man, or a genial medical practitioner. 
Most of his portraits argue strongly against the 
tradition of extreme manly beauty, though one 
and all reveal a strong, interesting, and aggressive 
personality. But we may accept Hawthorne's 
dictum that in youth all things are beautiful, and 
easily fit our minds to the belief that the creator 
of "Saul" and "Pippa Passes" could not have been 
other than an attractive man in both person 
and spirit. 

From early childhood Browning was reared in 
an atmosphere of poetry and refinement. His 
mother inherited a love of music and his father 
was hardly less gifted than the poet himself. He 
was a wide reader and was passionately fond of 
books, especially of Greek literature; he was pos- 
sessed of much skill, and still greater talent, as an 
artist, and was supremely endowed with all great 
qualities of manhood. He sang Greek lullabies 
to the infant Browning, and he was himself no 
mean poet. With such parents, and with such 
home surroundings, it was not wonderful that the 
boy began very early to make verses. By the time 
he was twelve years of age he had produced a vol- 
ume of poetry in the Byronic manner which must 
have had real merit and given great promise, for 
both his father and mother were willing to have it 



The Man Browning 15 

published. He wrote the manuscript out in a fair 
boyish hand, and used all his persuasive arts to 
get it printed, but, fortunately, without avail. 
We are now permitted to apply directly to **Sor- 
dello" and *'Red Cotton Night-Cap Country'' 
energies that might otherwise have been impaired 
by an exhaustive effort to appraise the tragic utter- 
ances of a world-weary genius of twelve. 

The spell of Byron was a dominant one while 
it lasted; but Browning's authentic call to a life 
of poetry came two or three years later, when he 
had nearly completed his fourteenth year. At 
that time he was as irrevocably sealed to poetry 
as was Wordsworth in that high moment of feel- 
ing and resolve when, after a night of youthful rev- 
elry, as the morning rose in memorable pomp 
and drenched the mountains about him in empy- 
rean light, he felt that vows had been made for 
him, and bond unknown, that he should, else sin- 
ning greatly, be a dedicated spirit; and when he 

Conversed with promises, had glimmering views 
How life pervades the undecaying mind; 
How the immortal soul with godlike power 
Informs, creates, and thaws the deepest sleep 
That time can lay upon her; how on earth 
Man, if he do but live within the light 
Of high endeavor, daily spreads abroad 
His being, armed with streng'^^Lthat cannot fail. 

^■ 

Browning's dedication was scarcely less solemn 



i6 Robert Browning 

and final. By a happy accident he fell upon the 
works of Shelley and, through him, upon those 
of Keats also. He had not even known that such 
poets had poured out their heart's blood in Eng- 
lish song. But having once caught the note of 
Shelley's music, and gained a glimpse of the 
ethereal realm that he inhabited, his soul was 
entranced, and the spirit of true poetry took pos- 
session of him for evermore. And scarcely less 
potent than the exhilarating ecstasy of Shelley's 
strains was the intoxication of beauty that flowed 
in the verse of Keats. But Shelley mastered him 
more completely than did Keats. His voice came 
like the call of an eagle from the blue depths above 
to its prisoned eaglet upon the earth. His influ- 
ence proved stimulating and lasting, and loosened 
once for all his pinioned soul for imaginative 
flights of song. 

Browning's education was conducted chiefly 
at home, though it was greatly enlarged by travel. 
He was fond of saying Italy was his university; 
and this assertion was far from untrue. His pas- 
sion for Italy was romantic, single, and unfailing; 
and Italy repaid his admiration with all high gifts 
of art and natural beauty and grandeur of storied 
and immemorial past. Truly, if we had explored 
to the "red-ripe" of his heart, we should have 
found Italy graven there. No foreigner knew its 



The Man Browning 17 

cities and bays and mountains and valleys bet- 
ter than he; no scholar had read its tragic, com- 
plex, and melancholy past more deeply than he; 
no poet more subtly and adequately read its record 
of heroism and passion than he. 

But Italy was not the only foreign country that 
attracted him and that contributed to his educa- 
tion. He did not, to be sure, visit the Orient, as 
he desired to do and dreamed of doing; nor did 
he ever cross the Atlantic and acquaint himself 
with our country, though Americans were among 
the earliest to appreciate his verse, and though 
many of his ardent and valued friends were Amer- 
icans. He early journeyed to Russia, and brought 
away with him lasting and picturesque impres- 
sions of its social life and its interminable snow- 
clad forests. Frequently he made long stays in 
France, reading and enjoying the eager and multi- 
tudinous life of Paris, permitting others to meet 
and lionize him, and recuperating in remote ham- 
lets or fishing villages. To be sure, his travels were 
not wide, but they were interested and fruitful; and 
he was less insular than most English poets — 
than Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, for 
example. This is abundantly proven by the fact 
that a great many of his finest poems have been 
taken to heart by the French and the Italians as 
among the most interpretative and sympathetic 



1 8 Robert Browning 

of the poems concerning their national life. 
After all, though, he was an Englishman, and it 
is not difficult to believe him when he sings: 

1 cherish most 
My love of England — how her name, a word 
Of hers in a strange tongue, makes my heart beat! 

Browning had few playmates in his childhood, 
and few companions in his early youth. His 
life in this respect, like that of Ruskin, was so 
restricted as to be almost unhealthful. As he 
grew toward manhood, though, his social nature 
asserted itself, and he made many enduring at- 
tachments. In nothing is the breadth of his nature 
better shown than in this capacity for friendship. 
He was as opulent in friends as he was in character 
and genius, and his intimacies were limited by 
neither age, sex, nationality, nor occupation. 
Among his earliest attachments were those that 
bound him to the gifted and noble-hearted Alfred 
Domett and his cousins, the Silverthornes. But 
as his genius came to be recognized his circle of 
friends rapidly widened, extending gradually 
from the coterie of literary men with whom he had 
early established pleasant relationships until it 
came to include all sorts and conditions of people. 
He possessed a strong social instinct, and with 
this a nature wholly manly, generous, and devoid 
of envy. He was quick to discern, and ardent to 



The Man Browning 19 

acknowledge, greatness in others; and in conse- 
quence he numbered among his stanchest friends 
men he might easily have antagonized and turned 
into bitter foes. Carlyle, for instance, was so 
volcanic and censorious that he could scarcely re- 
frain from pouring the vials of his wrath upon 
friend and foe alike, threatening thus the eternal 
destruction of all mankind. He was not in reality 
excessively harsh or vindictive, but he often left 
that impression. Landor, too, the untamed royal 
Bengal tiger among poets, even in his extreme old 
age quarreled with every friend and relative he 
had on earth — to say nothing of such as he had 
sent to an untimely grave. But Browning was 
so quick to see the noble qualities in his associates, 
and so disposed to overlook what was petty or 
ignoble in them, that he retained the cordial 
friendship of both of these men throughout life, 
even ministering to them like a son in their old 
age and misfortune. Among Englishmen, besides 
the two great men I have named, he enjoyed 
throughout life the devoted attachment of men as 
unlike as Tennyson, Dickens, Rossetti, Kenyon, 
Forster, and Mill; among Frenchmen, such men 
as Joseph Milsand and the Comte de Ripert- 
Monclar; among Americans, such men as Story, 
Hawthorne, Hillard, and Bayard Taylor; and 
among Italians, such statesmen and patriots as 



20 Robert Browning 

Cavour and Mazzini. Nor is it strange that what 
was finest and truest in him should have been de- 
veloped through the happy comradeship of women, 
for he was the exemplar and champion of all that 
high-minded women hold dear, and united in 
himself an abounding vitality of healthy manhood 
with a passionate and exalted devotion to the 
finest ideals of romantic love. He is read even 
now more constantly and widely by women than 
by men; his chief biographer has been a woman; 
he first won the love of Elizabeth Barrett through 
a bold and romantic friendship. Says Mrs. Suth- 
erland Orr, his biographer: "He avowedly pre- 
ferred the society of women to that of men; they 
were, as I have already said, his habitual confi- 
dantes, and evidently his most frequent corre- 
spondents." 

It is, though, only in the inner sanctuary of the 
poet's domestic affections that we shall breathe 
the true fragrance of his manhood. His nature — 
though at times too assertive and brusque — ^was 
in reality exquisitely ardent and tender. His 
love for his mother was an absorbing passion. 
Even up to mature manhood he invariably treated 
her with boyish devotion and tenderness. The 
story of the chivalric love he bore his wife has been 
so often, and so touchingly, celebrated that I need 
only allude to it. A passion so pure, so ideal, so 



The Man Browning 21 

unselfish, if treated at all, should be treated with 
classical delicacy and restraint. The experience 
is best embalmed in their own love-poetry. There 
the initiated and sympathetic may read it with 
greater satisfaction, surely, than in their biogra- 
phies or their correspondence. It is, one is con- 
strained to say, a record that enriches history, 
glorifies human nature, and adds to our store of 
confidence in the ultimate possibilities of the race. 
The exalting and consecrating power of this love 
upon the life of Robert Browning may be read in 
the poet's lyrical outburst in the early part of 
**The Ring and the Book," beginning: 

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird, 

And all a wonder and a wild desire, — 

Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, 

Took sanctuary within the holier blue, 

And sang a kindred soul out to his face, — 

Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart — 

When the first summons from the darkling earth 

Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, 

And bared them of the glory — to drop down. 

To toil for man, to suffer or to die, — 

This is the same voice; can thy soul know change? 

Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help! 

Never may I commence my song, my due 

To God who best taught song by gift of thee, 

Except with bent head and beseeching hand — 

That still, despite the distance and the dark, 

What was, again may be ; some interchange 

Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought, 

Some benediction anciently thy smile : 

— Never conclude, but raising hand and head 



22 Robert Browning 

Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn 

For all hope, all sustainment, all reward, 

Their utmost up and on, — so blessing back 

In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home. 

Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud, 

Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall! 

Though Browning pursued no regular college 
or university course, his preparation fitted him 
almost ideally for the life of a poet. His home 
surroundings were stimulating and refining, his 
religious and moral training unexceptionable; 
he grew up with the Bible, the Greek sages and 
singers, and the Elizabethan poets; he was in- 
structed in music and drawing and all manly and 
wholesome physical exercises; he had access to 
Nature, and from early youth sought solitary com- 
munion with her both by night and day, at the 
same time dwelling near enough the city of London 
to catch the pulsings of its mighty heart, and to 
translate the mystery and pathos of its notes of 
human joy and woe. Later he added the wealth 
of wisdom and insight that comes from travel; and 
anon the inspiring converse of great poets, and 
actors, and critics, and artists, and high-souled 
men of the world. And last of all he was caught up 
and transfigured by a great and heroic love which 
continued its chastening and exalting power over 
him long after the object of that passion had been 
taken from him. 



The Man Browning 23 

His was a restless and tireless nature. His 
energy knew no bounds, and the opulence and 
versatility of his genius was surprising. His read- 
ing was eager, wide-ranging, and omnivorous; and 
his exact and tenacious memory rendered all that 
he read available. Apart from his wide famil- 
iarity with the literature of his own day, his easy 
mastery of the Elizabethan poets, and his intimate 
acquaintance with classic authors, few men were 
more at home with the literature of the Middle 
Ages and the Renaissance. The Renaissance, in- 
deed, alike in its intellectual, its humanistic, and 
its religious interest, fairly lives again in his poetry. 
He wrote as diligently as he read, producing, as 
we have seen, a volume of poetry while still a boy; 
and no sooner had he reached the verge of young 
manhood than he set himself the gigantic task of 
writing "a series of monodramatic epics, narra- 
tives of the lives of typical souls." This partic- 
ular plan he never carried out, though in spirit he 
was true to it throughout his life, setting to work 
immediately and writing two such studies of the 
souls of great men — "Pauline" and "Paracelsus" 
— before his twenty-fifth year. But he did not 
limit himself to literature. He loved music, and 
spent so much time cultivating it that he became an 
excellent pianist. He was much interested in art 
also, and made drawings of no little merit. In 



24 Robert Browning 

the early days of his association with the artists 
and men of letters who became his lifelong friends 
he was thought of more as an artist and musician 
than as a poet. While residing in Italy after his 
marriage he devoted himself for a considerable 
time to modeling in clay, under the guidance of 
his American friend, Mr. Story, and his success 
in this field of art showed that he might have 
achieved distinction as a sculptor. Mr. Sharp, 
speaking of him during the ripe autumnal period 
of his life, says: "His avocations were so mani- 
fold that it is difficult to understand where he had 
leisure for his vocation. Everybody wished him to 
come to dine; and he did his utmost to gratify every- 
body. He saw everything; read all the notable 
books; kept himself acquainted with the leading 
contents of the journals and magazines; conducted 
a large correspondence; read new French, German, 
and Italian books of mark; read and translated 
Euripides and iEschylus; knew all the gossip of the 
literary clubs, salons, and the studios; was a fre- 
quenter of afternoon tea parties; and then, over 
and above it all, he was Browning: the most pro- 
foundly subtle mind that has exercised itself in 
poetry since Shakespeare." 

Intense, energetic, and many-sided as it was, 
Browning's character was not particularly elusive 
or complex. He stood in the open with manly 



The Man Browning 25 

simplicity and set forth his scheme of life and 
uttered his conviction without fear or favor. In 
many respects he was very old-fashioned in his 
habits and interests, and in his disregard of cus- 
tom, even, he often veered toward convention. 
He was in all essentials a middle-class nineteenth 
century Englishman; a poet, a thinker, a man of 
genius, but sturdily orthodox and common-sense. 
He eloped with Elizabeth Barrett, but in so doing 
he was pursuing a higher law of conduct than any 
social code could exact; and he solemnly and duly 
availed himself of the established rites of the 
church. He has written much about gypsies, and 
has imaginatively treated the lives of gypsies in 
his poetry, but I have scant faith in the legend 
that he sometimes shared the vagrant life of the 
gypsies. He has disavowed the forms and dogmas 
of Christianity, but in his feelings, his habits, 
and even in his impassioned utterances we find 
him adhering strictly to all the essentials of Chris- 
tianity. 

We are almost startled sometimes to read in 
such poems as "Confessions," "The Statue and the 
' Bust," and "Fifine at the Fair" what seems very 
much like the avowal of doctrines of free love; yet 
we know that he held strict — one may say puri- 
tanical — ideals of domestic virtue, and had an 
almost uncontrollable aversion to George Sand 



26 Robert Browning 

and her coterie — indeed, to the whole tribe of 
freethinkers, free-lovers, and Bohemian artists. 

It is, I think, just because of the simplicity and 
impulsiveness of his nature that Browning is hard 
to fix in a character delineation. We are disposed 
to set cautiously to work to entrap a subtle and 
serious philosopher in his dark ways when in 
reality we have to do with a joyous, boisterous, 
frank-hearted boy. We set about analyzing his 
secret as a conversationalist and are surprised 
to find that he talks at random, or excitedly, to 
cover his embarrassment, or impulsively, under 
the genial stimulus of a friendly group. And 
when struck with admiration for his easy social 
bearing, graceful manner, and happy repartee we 
discover that these fine achievements are heaven- 
sent accidents brought about to save a modest and 
nervous man from social snares that would 
have entrapped his trembling soul to perdition. 
Certain it is, at any rate, that Browning was ardent, 
excitable, and impulsive. His sensitive nature and 
sense of respect for the sacred things of the soul 
led him to delicate reserves, but usually he was 
the most frank and communicative of men — lay- 
ing open his own foibles to the world with the 
consciousness, doubtless, that they would receive 
the more lenient treatment thereby. In conversa- 
tion he was at his best when excited to forgetful 



The Man Browning 27 

monologue by a friend or a friendly circle; and he 
confesses that all through life so great was his 
nervous trepidation at the thought of facing some 
ordinary social exigency that he could not have 
been convinced of his ability to bear it off success- 
fully had he not had the proof of former experi- 
ences to assure him that he could do it. 

The same ingenuousness and temperamental 
ardor of which I have spoken goes far to explain 
another strong tendency of Browning's nature — 
namely, his occasional indignant outbursts of 
wrath. He says of himself in one of his poems, " I 
was ever a fighter,'' but we naturally connect this 
statement with the magnificent intellectual and 
spiritual conflicts in which we know Browning en- 
gaged; and we feel surprised at occasional uncon- 
trolled outbursts of anger such as were elicited by 
Macready's treatment of him and Fitzgerald's criti- 
cism of his wife's poetry, and at his impassioned de- 
nunciation of the charlatan who sought to write a 
garbled biography of his wife for commercial pur- 
poses. His feelings were so strong, and his con- 
victions so firm, that when argument failed, and 
will power was unavailing, he was likely to resort 
either to consuming wrath or pained and grim 
silence. Such outbursts were not, however, out 
of harmony with a tender and gentle heart; for in 
the reaction from such moods these fundamental 



28 Robert Browning 

qualities of his nature were frequently most ap- 
parent; so it is evident that impulse and uncon- 
trolled nervous excitement must account for them. 
It is interesting to be admitted to the workshop 
of a man of genius — to know how, and when, and 
where he calls his beautiful beings into life. 
Browning's biographers say little about his habits 
as a poet. We do, though, have some accounts 
of the outdoor life of the young poet that are sug- 
gestive and artistically satisfying. In his early 
youth he v»^as fond of resorting to a secluded spot 
on Heme Hill, where, in the shade cast by three 
noble elms, he could lie, looking off upon the city 
of London, and dream away the hours. It was 
during a night visit to this secluded resort that the 
call of humanity first made its imaginative appeal 
to his sympathies and awoke in him the desire 
and the determination to be its interpreter. Dur- 
ing the early years of his manhood he lived much 
out of doors, and even, like Wordsworth, composed 
aloud in the open air. He was much given to ex- 
tended night walks; frequently, after writing until 
far into the night, he would walk out thus, alone, 
and remain to watch the dawn. His favorite re- 
sort at this time was a wood at no great distance 
from Camberwell, and it was during his solitary 
night watches here that he began more and more 
deeply to enter into the human life that pulsed so 



The Man Browning 29 

restlessly in the smoky, mist-wreathed city at his 
feet. He was, too, a wonderfully acute observer 
of nature, even to its most minute processes, and 
no one can fully appreciate the delicate realism of 
some of his descriptions of insects, flowers, and 
birds until he has a picture of him, on some sun- 
shiny holiday, lying breathless and motionless in 
the grass, or beside some hedge, watching the un- 
conscious life about him with the eye of a Thoreau. 

"I have heard him say," says Mr. Sharp, "that 
his faculty of observation at that time would not 
have appeared despicable to a Seminole or an Iro- 
quois; he saw and watched everything, the bird on 
the wing, the snail dragging its shell up the pen- 
dulous woodbine, the bee adding to his golden 
treasure as he swung in the bells of the campanula, 
the green fly darting hither and thither like an 
animated seedling, the spider weaving her gossa- 
mer from twig to twig, the woodpecker heedfully 
scrutinizing the lichen on the gnarled oak-bole, 
the passage of the wind through leaves or across 
grass, the motions and shadows of the clouds, and 
so forth." 

He had throughout life a decided fondness for 
animals and an intimate knowledge of their 
haunts and habits. His democratic tastes in his 
animal friendships I cannot but reprehend. 
Sometimes during his boyhood his mother could 



30 Robert Browning 

not persuade him to take a disagreeable medicine 
until she had promised to catch a frog for him by 
way of reward; and when he grew old enough to 
provide his own menagerie it contained owls, 
snakes, monkeys, parrots, an eagle, hedgehogs, 
magpies, toads, and lizards. The creatures would 
frequently be brought home in his pockets and be 
consigned to his mother's care. He could at any 
time lure a lizard into the sunshine by whistling 
a peculiar call; and we have accounts of him, as 
an old man, amusing himself in this way as he 
walked about the highways and byways of the 
lovely little Italian village of Asolo. When the 
poet's father moved to Hatcham, about 1835, 
Browning not only had the enjoyment of his uncle's 
horse, York — the hero of Browning's most stir- 
ring ballad of the saddle — but also the com- 
panionship of a pet toad, which would follow him 
about in his walks, and would come out of its hole 
when Browning indicated his presence by dropping 
gravel into its retreat. 

Throughout life Browning was a man of robust 
health and overflowing vitality. First, last, and 
midmost, as we read his works, or read works 
about him, is this impression of vivid healthful- 
ness and abounding life. His father was a man of 
flawless physical constitution, having never known 
sickness during his long life of eighty-four years. 



The Man Browning 31 

From him Browning no doubt inherited his fine 
endurance and vigor. From his mother, on the 
other hand, he received his highly charged nervous 
temperament and extreme sensitiveness to phys- 
ical stimuli. However this may be, no one met 
him without feeling the impression of his splendid 
health and optimism. His voice was strong, 
vibrant, and cheering; his handshake gave one the 
sense of an electric shock; and his physical magnet- 
ism either attracted or repelled whomsoever he 
approached. Elizabeth Barrett felt that from the 
moment he entered her darkened chamber his pres- 
ence meant life, not death. But upon others his 
personality had quite the opposite effect. The 
story is told of an old lady with somewhat trouble- 
some nerves, at an afternoon reception, who arose 
to leave with some abruptness, excusing herself to 
her hostess for her early departure by explaining 
that the voice and proximity of "a too exuberant 
financier" affected her "like a mild attack of pins 
and needles." Her discomfiture may be imagined 
when she was informed that the obnoxious per- 
sonality was that of Robert Browning. There is 
present all through his poetry, too, the ringing 
note of joy in mere sensuous existence, as when 
in "Saul" he breaks forth into lusty song: 

Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit feels waste, 
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. 



32 Robert Browning 

Oh, the wild joys of living! Lhe leaping from rock up to rock, 
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool 

silver shock 
Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, 
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust 

divine, 
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught 

of wine, 
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell 
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. 
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy! 



CHAPTER II 

BROWNING'S WAY TO TRUTH 

Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust 
As wholly love allied to ignorance! 
There lies thy truth and safety. 

We begin our study of Browning's philosophy of 
life with an inquiry into his theory of knowledge. 
And at the very outset we are perplexed because 
we have two Brownings to deal with : one the con- 
fident, inspired Browning of early and middle life 
— the creator of "Abt Vogler," "Andrea del Sarto/' 
"Saul," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and "The Ring and 
the Book" — the poet Browning in the plenitude of 
his power; the other the Browning whom old age 
had subdued to the philosophic temper — writing 
under the guidance of reason rather than of imag- 
ination, caring more for the intellectual than for 
the artistic quality of his verse — the author of "La 
Saisiaz," "Ferishtah's Fancies," "Parleyings," and 
"Asolando": the casuist and metaphysician. The 
product of the first period is far richer in content 
and more artistic in form than the product of the 
second period. He was then in the free exercise of 
the poetic function; and the function of the poet I 

3 33 



34 Robert Browning 

deem far higher than that of the scientist or phi- 
losopher — higher, even, than that of the preacher. 
The poet is the seer. Reality to him is one and 
whole and convincing. It presents itself to him 
not merely as truth, or beauty, or righteousness, but 
as all these at once. His nature exerts itself fully, 
spontaneously, and harmoniously; and in conse- 
quence he represents humanity at its best. 

It was so with Browning; and, as we turn to his 
earlier works to trace there his theory of knowledge, 
we find wise, sane, and stimulating utterances con- 
cerning man's power to grasp and understand 
truth. He turns to God as the center of intelli- 
gence and the source of all knowledge: 

This is the glory, — that in all conceived, 

Or felt or known, I recognize a mind 

Not mine but like mine, — for the double joy, — 

Making all things for me and me for Him. 



Yet my poor spark had for its source the sun; 
Thither I sent the great looks which compel 
Light from its fount: all that I do and am 
Comes from the truth, or seen or else surmised, 
Remembered or divined, as mere man may. 

Man, as he is created in God's mental as well as 
moral image, is the organ of divine intelligence, 
and succeeds only as he relies upon his Creator. 
Though not coerced, he is urged on to attainment 
and endeavor by the spirit that energizes within 



Browning's Way to Truth 35 

him. Says the young Paracelsus as he sets out 
upon his life quest for universal truth: 

I go to prove my soul! 
I see my way as birds their trackless way. 
I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, 
I ask not : but unless G od send his hail 
Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, 
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: 
He guides me and the bird. In his good time! 

Nor is man's knowledge limited to God and 
himself. He has access also to an orderly world 
outside himself, and enjoys community of knowl- 
edge with those about him. Knowledge has 
objective validity — so far at least as man's limited 
vision extends, for he does not assert that human 
knowledge is absolute. It is trustworthy as far 
as it goes — as all other finite powers are — but it is 
not such fullness of knowledge as is possessed by 
the Absolute. He sees as God sees, and pursues 
safely the path that God points out, but he cannot 
see so far as God sees, nor trust himself out of the 
circle of light shed by the divine: 

Man is not God, but hath God's end to serve, 
A master to obey, a course to take, 
Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become. 



Man, therefore, stands on his own stock 
Of love and power as a pin-point rock, 
And looks to God, who ordained divorce 
Of the rock from his boundless continent. 



36 Robert Browning 

Man has no reason, however, to be dismayed or 
discouraged because he has not yet attained to 
perfect knowledge. For progress is the law of 
his being, and if it is not yet given him fully to 
apprehend, he may with all confidence reach 
toward the prize of his high endeavor. For his 
knowledge constantly broadens. What he could 
not know to-day he may know to-morrow, and 
what to-morrow withholds a more distant future 
is sure to yield. Youth, with its errors and 
doubts and passions, is interpreted in the light of 
the placid knowledge that comes in old age; and 
what death leaves us in ignorance of is to be 
achieved by the soul in its wide-ranging conquests 
in other worlds after it has freed itself from the 
alloy of flesh: 

Therefore I summon age 

To grant youth's heritage, 
Life's struggle having so far reached its term: 

Thence shall I pass, approved 

A man, for aye removed 
From the developed brute ; a God though in the germ. 

And I shall thereupon 

Take rest, ere I be gone 
Once more on my adventure brave and new: 

Fearless and unperplexed, 

When I wage battle next. 
What weapons to select, what armor to indue. 

So spake the poet and the seer in Browning. 
And how disappointing to turn, from such large. 



Browning's Way to Truth i^'^ 

confident, and luminous teachings concerning 
man's power to know, to a consideration of the 
perverse and erroneous doctrines set forth by 
Browning in his old age, affer he had lapsed from 
the privileged estate of the poet and entered upon 
the effort to establish his philosophy of life in 
accordance with strictly speculative methods. As 
our chief interest in these pages, however, is with 
Browning the philosopher, rather than with Brown- 
ing the poet, we must now busy ourselves with 
his later, more systematic, and more ambitious 
views concerning a theory of knowledge. 

And we may as well admit at once that, con- 
sidered from the standpoint of speculative reason, 
Browning's philosophy went to pieces upon just 
this rock. Browning is an out-and-out philo- 
sophical skeptic. He does not trust man's intel- 
lectual powers, nor see any good ground to hope 
that man can enter into sure possession of the 
world of reality around him. He utterly dis- 
credits human knowledge, and with rare subtlety 
and dialectical skill sets about to undermine the 
edifice of pure reason. He casts doubt upon the 
possibility of man's ever rearing a safe structure 
upon the foundation of intellect alone. It is not 
that the finite mind is unable to grasp reality in its 
fullness. That would be merely to assert that 
human knowledge is incomplete — that progress 



38 Robert Browning 

IS the law of its nature. His skepticism goes much 
deeper than this. He questions the trustworthi- 
ness of human reason. He does not beHeve that 
reason is adequate to enter the realm of universal 
truth and win sure victories there. He maintains 
that by nature it is deceptive and illusory. It 
makes and unmakes its shadowy world. It weaves 
cobwebs between the finite mind and the world of 
ultimate reality, now mistaking these figments for 
truth and anon perceiving them to be false. His 
assertion of agnosticism is at its worst appalling 
in its force and completeness. In "A Pillar at 
Sebzevar" he says: 

Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust 
As wholly love allied to ignorance! 
There lies thy truth and safety. 

And, again, in *^ Francis Furini": 

Thus much at least is clearly understood — 
Of power does Man possess no -particle : 
Of knowledge — just so much as shows that still 
It ends in ignorance on every side. 

Browning denies even that he has access to a 
common world of experience with his fellow men. 
So far as knowledge is concerned he is shut within 
the narrow limits of his own subjective world. 
He knows nothing assuredly except that he him- 
self exists, that his world of inner consciousness 
is visited by sensations of pain and pleasure, and 



Browning's Way to Truth 39 

that God exists outside of and above him. He can 
speak out for himself, but "nowise dare play the 
spokesman for" his "brothers strong and weak." 
There is no objective world of valid truth, no 
meeting place of fact and experience, no external 
test of knowledge. Each one sees and reports for 
himself. Different individuals may even observe 
the same fact yet disagree utterly in their report 
of it. The outside world offers merely 

Conjecture manifold, 
But, as knowledge, this conies only — things may be as 

I behold, 
Or may not be, but, without me and above me, things there 

are; 
I myself am what I know not — ignorance which proves 

no bar 
To the knowledge that I am, and since I am, can recog- 
nize 
What to me is pain and pleasure: this is sure, the rest — 

surmise. 
If my fellows are or are not, what may please them and 

what pain, — 
Mere surmise: my own experience — that is knowledge, once 

a^ain! 

Knowledge stands on my experience: all outside is narrow 

hem, 
Free surmise may sport and welcome! Pleasures, pains 

affect mankind 
Just as they affect myself? Why, here's my neighbor 

color blind. 
Eyes like mine, to all appearance: "green as grass" do I 

affirm? 
"Red as grass" he contradicts me: which employs the proper 

term? 



40 Robert Browning 

But not even here does Browning stay his mis- 
guided course. He pushes resolutely forward 
into the realm of conduct and throws confusion 
over man's moral nature. He teaches that it is 
as impossible to know the good as it is to know 
the true. In this wilderness of nescience into 
which he has strangely stumbled he not only sets 
men to pursue phantoms of reality that forever 
elude them — now appearing to be truth, and now 
to be falsehood — but he condemns them as well 
to wage unending warfare with the shadows of 
good and evil, and leaves them in perpetual doubt 
as to which way the battle has gone. He holds 
that the conflicts of life 

teach 
What good is and what evil, — just the same, 
Be feigning or be fact the teacher, 

and asserts that 

Here and there a touch 
Taught me, betimes, the artifice of things — 
That all about, external to myself, 
Was meant to be suspected, — not revealed 
Demonstrably a cheat, — but half seen through. 

It is hard to understand how a thinker of 
Browning's subtlety and acumen could have held 
such false and contradictory doctrines as we have 
just deduced. If, however, we proceed a step 
farther with him in his attempt to understand and 



Browning's Way to Truth 41 

interpret reality, restraining ourselves for the pres- 
ent from any attempt to condemn or criticise him, 
we shall see why it was that he degraded the 
human intellect and repudiated the possibility of 
an intelligible world about us. In an oft-quoted 
sentence, to be found in the introduction to ''Sor- 
dello," Browning says: "My stress lay on the inci- 
dents in the development of a soul: little else is 
worth study/' No single utterance of Browning's 
could better suggest to us the point of departure 
for his philosophy of life. His interest centered 
in the spiritual life of man. The moral struggle 
of humanity in its upward progress from dust to 
divinity — this it was that, throughout his long 
career as a poet, riveted his attention, challenged 
his intellect, and suggested to his creative imagi- 
nation endless situations for artistic treatment. 

This world's no blot for us 
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: 
To find its meaning is my meat and drink. 

This was Browning's note from the first. And 
if now we keep steadfastly in mind his supreme 
interest in the spiritual welfare of man, and his 
unwavering faith that the universe in which we 
live is in its inmost nature a good universe — if, in 
other words, we bear in mind that, first, last, and 
always, Browning's dominating passion was his 
optimistic faith — we shall be able to see more 



42 Robert Browning 

clearly why it was that he deemed it necessary to 
rear his cloudy and threatening world of skepti- 
cism over against his radiant world of faith. It 
was because he saw no other way to justify his 
optimism, and was compelled to seek a deeper 
principle than knowledge upon which to ground 
his philosophy — that of universal love; discarding 
knowledge utterly except as a background of 
illusion, deception, and uncertainty. Ignorance is 
necessary, he maintains, for the development of 
the moral life: 

I have lived, then, done and suffered, loved and hated, 
learnt and taught 

This — there is no reconciling wisdom with a world dis- 
traught. 

Goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the 
aim. 

If — (to my own sense, remember! though none other feel 
the same!) 

If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's place, 

And life, time, — with all their chances, changes, — just pro- 
bation space, 

Mine, for me. 

It is only through ignorance of what is true and 
what is false that we are able to make moral 
choices; for if we infallibly knew one course to be 
evil and the other course to be good, we would 
choose the good course and avoid the evil one. 
And there could be no merit in doing what we were 
obliged to do any more than there would be fault 



Browning's Way to Truth 43 

in doing what was equally compulsory. The 
moral life would thus come to a standstill, and 
man would no longer be man, for Browning 

Finds progress man's distinctive mark alone. 

Struggle — the passage from what is lower to what 
is higher, or, for that matter, struggle whether 
it issue in victory or defeat, since Browning 
thought one scarcely more praiseworthy than the 
other, if only the battle had been bravely fought — 
struggle is the very essence of man's nature. 

Think! 
Could I see plain, be somehow certified 
All was illusion, — evil far and wide 
Was good disguised, — why, out with one huge wipe 
Goes knowledge from me. Type needs antitype: 
As night needs day, as shine needs shade, so good 
Needs evil: how were pity understood 
Unless by pain? Make evident that pain 
Permissibly masks pleasure — you abstain 
From outstretch of the finger-tip that saves 
A drowning fly. 

In "A Death in the Desert " — as the dying John 
talks with the watchers who have gathered about 
him to hear concerning the Christ, whom he had 
known in the flesh — the relation between knowl- 
edge and conduct is emphasized in a unique way. 
John points out to them that, if the soul could 
know the prosperous course with as much certainty 
as the bodily wants, such as cold, hunger, and 



44 Robert Browning 

thirst, get themselves satisfied when they come 
within reach of what they instinctively feel to be 
their gain, then man's probation would be at an 
end. His distinctive function as man would 
be over with, once for all. For it is for man to 
reason and decide. He must weigh and then 
choose. Would he give up fire for gold or rich 
apparel if he had once come to know its worth ? 
asks Browning. 

Could he give Christ up were His worth as plain? 
Therefore, I say, to test man, the proofs shift, 
Nor may he grasp that fact like other facts. 
And straightway in his life acknowledge it, 
As, say, the indubitable bliss of fire. 

But, interrupt his friends, surely it must have 
been easier for you to believe in Christ, who walked 
in daily conversation and communion with him 
in the flesh, than for us at this remote time. Not 
at all, replies the dying apostle. I am left alive to 
show you that such was not the case, for is it not 
recorded of me I "forsook and fled" ? If I had 
known Christ's worth, as my hand knows warmth 
and seeks it when cold, how could it have been 
possible that the torchlight and the noise and 
"the sudden Roman faces, violent hands, and 
fear of what the Jews might do" could have 
availed to separate me from him ? That was my 
trial, he continues, and that was the way it ended. 



Browning's Way to Truth 45 

But be sure (and here Browning clinches his pe- 
culiar doctrine) my soul gained its truth from the 
experience — ^would henceforth grow — and from 
that time forth so forceful did the lesson become 
upon my lips, and in my whole life, that there 
was no little child or tender woman, notwith- 
standing that they had never seen for themselves 
the least thing of all that I had seen. 

Who did not clasp the cross with a Hght laugh, 
Or wrap the burning robe round, thanking God. 

In the " Epistle of Karshish" Browning flashes 
the same truth upon us from a slightly different 
angle. Here he wishes to show that perfect knowl- 
edge would be out of proportion with the temporal 
and finite order in which man must find his place 
so long as he remains upon earth. Lazarus, after 
his recovery from the tomb, knows too much. He 
has had a vision of how things proceed behind 
the veil, and the revelation has all but blasted his 
human understanding. There seems to be utter 
lack of adjustment between his open-eyed vision 
of absolute truth, as it had been made known to 
him while his spirit existed apart from the body, 
and the requirements of human action and judg- 
ment. Occurrences that seem of supreme impor- 
tance to those about him he ignores or disregards, 
and trifling circumstances or insignificant incidents 



46 Robert Browning 

arouse him to sudden horror or excitement. 
Plainly his view of "things-as-they-are" had upset 
all his human standards of knowledge and con- 
duct so that he was spoiled for ordinary mortal 
pursuits. What to other men appeared evil he 
— seeing it in its ultimate bearings — counted good; 
and what to the ordinary man appeared innocent 
or harmless, to him, by virtue of his perfect intelli- 
gence, appeared momentous. He was, thus, prac- 
tically incapacitated from discharging the moral 
functions of manhood. 

So here — we call the treasure knowledge, say, 

Increased beyond the fleshly faculty — 

Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, 

Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven: 

The man is witless of the size, the sum, 

The value in proportion of all things, 

Or whether it be little or be much. 

Discourse to him of prodigious armaments 

Assembled to besiege his city now, 

And of the passing of a mule with gourds — 

'Tis one! Then take it on the other side, 

Speak of some trifling fact, — he will gaze rapt 

With stupor at its very littleness, 

(Far as I see) as if in that indeed 

He caught prodigious import, whole results; 

And so will turn to us the bystanders 

In ever the same stupor (note this point) 

That we too see not with his opened eyes. 

Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play, 

Preposterously, at cross purposes. 

Should his child sicken unto death, — why, look 

For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, 

Or pretermission of the daily craft! 



Browning's Way to Truth 47 

While a word, gesture, glance from that same child 
At play or in the school or laid asleep 
Will startle him to an agony of fear, 
Exasperation, just as like. 

I have said enough, I think, to make it perfectly 
clear that Browning's matured theory of knowl- 
edge — the theory of knowledge which in spite 
of its inconsistencies he tenaciously clung to in his 
later years in preference to the saner intuitive 
faith of his youth and middle age — was held in 
subordination to what he considered of vastly 
more importance — his optimistic theory of the 
universe. It does not fall within the purpose of 
this chapter to tell how thoroughgoing, radiant, 
and stimulating his optimistic theory was, but be- 
fore I pass from this discussion I must bring into 
clear relief the principle with which he undergirded 
his optimism and that he sets over against his 
skeptical theory of knowledge. That principle, 
as I have already intimated, is love — for Brown- 
ing the essence and ultimate principle of all 
reality. From the beginning of his poetic career 
to its close he continually unfolds this lofty 
and impressive teaching. It shines forth in 
"Pauline" and "Paracelsus," his earliest works; it 
glows upon every page of his dramas; it finds 
eloquent utterance in "The Ring and the Book"; 
it leaps forth into passionate splendor in "Saul" 
and "Karshish," and burns with mellow but un- 



48 Robert Browning 

dimmed radiance in '^Ferishtah's Fancies" and 
"Asolando." 

As I have said, he sets it over against his faulty 
theory of knowledge and seeks by the all-con- 
quering power of love to achieve what the intellect 
alone is unable to accomplish. It is the outgush- 
ing of the inner nature of God himself. Its truth 
and authority and beneficence are immediate, 
and their validity admits of no question. Love 
exalts man to immediate vision of God; and to the 
degree that love is present in the human heart 
man's nature enters into union with the divine 
nature. It purifies, quickens, and strengthens 
the intellect; so that in proportion as love is present 
knowledge becomes full and unerring. The proc- 
ess whereby Browning deduces this ultimate con- 
ception upon which he founds his theory of life is 
sound and rational. He interprets the universe 
from an idealistic standpoint, and finds in theistic 
evolution the law of its development. He posits 
love as the spiritual activity at the heart of reality, 
and discovers in it a sufficient explanation for both 
man and nature. While, of course, not exhaust- 
ively scientific in his application of love as the 
solving principle of all human and cosmic activity, 
he tests his hypothesis very widely, and makes no 
vital postulate that must not be made by both 
science and philosophy. No fruitful progress can 



Browning's Way to Truth 49 

be made by either science or philosophy until some 
large assumptions have been made. And surely 
we shall get farther on our way toward a final ex- 
planation of the universe if we assume that what 
has turned out to be highest in the unfolding proc- 
ess whereby the world has gradually been reveal- 
ing its inner nature was present from the first than 
we should if we assumed that the highest has 
evolved from the lowest — spirit from matter, love 
from blind force. In the succeeding chapters we 
shall see how successfully Browning applied this 
ultimate conception of love to all the daily activi- 
ties of life. 

''here is no good of life but love — but love! 
V7hat else looks good is some shadow flung from love, 
Love gilds it, gives it worth. 
4 



CHAPTER III 

THE PATH TO GOD 

"He there with the brand flamboyant, broad o'er night's for- 
lorn abyss, 

Crowned by prose and verse; and wielding, with Wit's 
bauble, Learning's rod" . . . 

Well? Why, he at least believed in Soul, was very sure of 
God! 

Browning reaches his world of ultimate truth, 
then, not by intellect, but by intuition. He adds 
nothing new to our store of knowledge, though he 
does gain fresh and rich insight into the ultimate 
realities of life. Throughout the entire range of 
his poetry the existence of God as the ground and 
explanation of all being is spontaneously and stoutly 
assumed. It is not a matter for argument. It is a 
fact as immediate and indisputable as the existence 
of his own soul. In his narrative and dramatic 
poems, such as " Paracelsus," "Saul," "Sordello," 
"Rabbi Ben Ezra," "Andrea del Sarto," "Luria," 
"Pippa Passes," "Abt Vogler," and a hundred 
others, his characters accept the existence and au- 
thority of God without question or reflection. God 
is as much a part of their world as the sky under 
which they were born, or the facts of the world 

50 



The Path to God 51 

of common sense through which they take 
their daily course. It no more occurs to them 
to question his reahty, might, and authority 
than it does to one of KipHng's Tommy Atkins 
men to raise questions concerning the existence 
and authority of her Majesty. Unless it be a 
Bluphocks, or a Gigadibs, or a Fifine, Brown- 
ing's characters are, almost without exception, 
"incurably religious." Some of them, it is true, 
hold very grotesque and reprehensible theistic 
views — a Caliban, an Ixion, a Guido, or a Sludge; 
but with very rare exceptions they are all theolo- 
gians and each is in his own way attempting to 
keep on the good side of the being whom he 
enthrones as his God. In his own person, too, 
particularly in the reflective and speculative poems 
in which he grapples with the ultimate problems 
of thought and reality that assail the minds of all 
earnest and intelligent men. Browning postulates 
God as a necessary implication of all that is deep- 
est and most inexplicable in human life. In none 
of his poems, perhaps, does he more insistently 
and resolutely set himself to interrogate the grounds 
of his religious faith than in ''La Saisiaz," and here 
is the statement of his fundamental presupposition: 

I have questioned and_ am answered. Question, answer 

presuppose 
Two points : that the thing itself which questions, answers, — 

is, it knows; 



52 Robert Browning 

As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself, — a force 
Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course, 
Unaffected by its end, — that this thing likewise needs must be ; 
Call this — God, then, call that — soul, and both — the only- 
facts for me. 
Prove them facts? that they o'erpass my power of proving, 

proves them such: 
Fact it is I know I know not something which is fact as 
much. 

As we examine more closely into this sponta- 
neously derived conception of God — a naked pos- 
tulate as yet — ^we find that it unfolds into a lumi- 
nous and consistent theistic theory of the universe. 
The God that Browning posits proves to be a 
spiritual activity — unitary,* free, and intelligent — 
a personal being, therefore. From him all finite 
existence proceeds and upon him all life depends. 
Browning is thus seen to be an idealist. The 
primal essence is not matter but mind. Nor does 
God make man and nature out of some primitive 
material that lies conveniently at hand. Both 
man and nature derive their existence from him, 
but not by reason of any outward compulsion or 
any violent rending asunder of his own being. 
He is absolute and independent, and under 
no law of necessity. The cosmic world with 
all its varied and beautiful phenomena is rather 
an activity of the inner nature of God whereby he 
expresses his creative rapture; and man likewise 
he posits in his-own image, impelled by some up- 



The Path to God 53 

rushing interest of joy or love in his own being. 
The creation of the finite world is seen, therefore, 
to be no limitation of himself. It is a process 
through which he more completely realizes him- 
self. Nor is his unity destroyed. It is, rather, 
through his eternally active and unfailing creative 
power that the universe is held together and given 
the stamp of reality. The laws of nature are 
nothing other than expressions of his activity. 
Its phenomena are activities of God, and a reflec- 
tion £>^ him, but they are not part and parcel of 
him; and so man, though he derives his essence 
from God and is hourly sustained by the immanent 
presence of God, is yet not God, but himself, with 
his own pin-point of independent existence. 
Browning escapes both the dark world of mate- 
rialism, into which so many of our modern scien- 
tists and philosophers have stumbled and lost 
their way, and the abyss of pantheism, into which 
philosophical poets like Emerson and poetical 
philosophers like Schelling have been lured to 
speculative destruction. 

In *'Mr. Sludge 'the Medium,'" "A Death in 
the Desert," and " Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau" 
he takes delight in girding at the materialistic evolu- 
tionist. Speaking of the origin of man, he says: 

"Will you have why and wherefore, and the fact 
Made plain as pikestaff?" modern Science asks. 



54 Robert Browning 

" That mass man sprung from was a jelly-lump 
Once on a time; he kept an after-course 
Through fish and insect, reptile, bird and beast, 
Till he attained to be an ape at last 
Or last but one." 

And in another place he says: 

Well, sir, the old way's altered somewhat since, 

And the world wears another aspect now: 

Somebody turns our spyglass round, or else 

Puts a new lens in it: grass, worm, fly grow big: 

We find great things are made of little things, 

And little things go lessening till at last 

Comes God behind them. Talk of mountains now? 

We talk of mold that heaps the mountain, mites 

That throng the mold, and God that makes the mites. 

The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst. 

The simplest of creations, just a sac 

That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives 

And feels, and could do neither, we conclude, 

If simplified still further one degree. 

After having had his fufi at the expense of his 
scientific brother who holds to his simian ancestry 
with more gusto than an enlightened poet is wont 
to do, Browning usually states his own conviction 
and conclusion in some such lines as these: 

This is the glory, — that in all conceived. 

Or felt or known, I recognize a mind 

Not mine but like mine, — for the double joy, — 

Making all things for me and me for Him. 



He glows above 
With scarce an intervention, presses close 
And palpitatingly his soul o'er ours: 
We feel him, nor by painful reason know! 
The everlasting minute of creation 



The Path to God 55 

Is felt there; now it is as it was then, 

All changes at his instantaneous will: 

Not by the operation of a law 

Whose maker is elsewhere at other work, 

His hand is still engaged upon his world — 

Man's praise can forward it, man's prayer suspend. 

For is not God all-mighty? 

In the passage last quoted we have a fine ex- 
pression of Browning's behef in the immanence 
of God in the universe. There is, even, a strong 
Neoplatonic influence present in some of his ear- 
liest works that leads to a view of God and the 
world that verges closely upon pantheism. But 
in his mature works he repeatedly makes it clear, 
not only that God is a person — the cause of the 
world, not its maker — but, also, that man himself, 
once created, possesses in his own right the qual- 
ities of freedom, intelligence, and personality: 

I, — not He, — 
Live, think, do human work here — no machine 
His will moves, but a being by myself, 
His, and not He — who made me for^ work, 
_-^ Watches my working, judges its effect, 
But does not interpose. 

We turn now to the three aspects of the divine 
nature that particularly interested Browning, and 
that received full treatment and illustration at his 
hand: intelligence, will, and love. 

That the Creator of this orderly universe, who 
fnoves forward from generation to generation per- 



56 Robert Browning 

fectly adapting means to ends, subduing constantly 
the lower to the higher, and *' equalizing, ever and 
anon, in momentary rapture, great with small," 
is an intelligent being admits of neither doubt nor 
discussion in Browning's mind. The same glance 
that convinces him that "God's in his heaven" 
convinces him likewise that "from God down to 
the lowest spirit ministrant intelligence exists." 
He reads purpose, forethought, and wisdom every- 
where. It is true, as I have already shown, that 
he discredits the efforts of the finite mind to com- 
prehend truth; but he invariably does so that he 
may the more glorify the immensity and unfath- 
omable wisdom of the divine mind. Man's mind 
is a spark, but it has for its source the sun; a pin- 
point rock, but it has deep-rooted connection with 
the continent. Browning had little patience with 
scientific and philosophical theories that seek to 
explain the universe upon the basis of mechanical 
laws. He thought it preposterous that men should 
attribute to blind force or impersonal mechanical 
law the noble outcome to be found in man's own 
nature, and in society as he has organized it for 
his enjoyment and welfare. His only argument 
against such views was neglect or good-natured 
scorn. His unvarying assumption is that the 
foundations of the world are laid in wisdom; that 
God is the great Geometer; and that all orders of 



The Path to God 57 

created life, from the midge up to man, are not 
only the product of an intelligent being, but are 
able also, in proportion to their needs and in ac- 
cordance with the faculty bestowed on each, to 
appreciate and reflect him: 

O, Thou — as represented here to nie 

In such conception as my soul allows, — 

Under Thy measureless, my atom width! — 

Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass 

Wherein are gathered all the scattered points 

Picked out of the immensity of sky 

To reunite there, be our heaven for earth, 

Our known unknown, our God revealed to man? 

Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole; 

Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense, — 

There, (which is nowhere, speech must babble thus!) 

In the absolute immensity, the whole 

Appreciable solely by Thyself, — 

Here, by the little mind of man reduced 

To littleness that suits his faculty, 

In the degree appreciable too; 

Between Thee and ourselves — nay even, again, 

Below us, to the extreme of the minute, 

Appreciable by how many and what diverse 

Modes of the life Thou madest be! 

Divine will, or "Power" — to use Browning's 
favorite term — ^is as obvious and indisputable in 
all the ongoings of the universe as divine intelli- 
gence. The intuition with which he perceives the 
existence of God is one and instantaneous with 
his insight that God is wisdom and power: 

Thus much is clear, 
Doubt annulled thus much : I know. 



58 Robert Browning 

AH is effect of Cause: 

As it would, has willed and done 

Power: and my mind's applause 
Goes, passing laws each one, 

To Omnipotence, lord of laws. 

"God is the perfect poet, who in his person acts 
his own creations." The visible world is the out- 
rushing of his will; he ordains the seasons; sets 
the stars in their courses; out of his boundless 
spiritual energy supplies motives and incentives to 
man; and momentarily, by the unwearied exer- 
cise of his will, sustains the complex and far- 
reaching processes of intelligence which he has 
appointed. 

Thus far Browning has found the path of the- 
istic faith an easy one to tread. He has reached 
God at a bound, and has instantaneously inter- 
preted him as a being of limitless intelligence and 
power. But intelligence and power, he finds, are 
unable to satisfy the deepest needs of his life. For 
as he looks about him it is manifest that at every 
turn of the finite path that leads up to God are 
the painful evidences of folly, mistake, defeat, 
and sorrow. Noble and insatiable aspirations 
for truth and knowledge met by limitations, and 
disappointment, and mockery on every hand! 
Splendid attempts upon the part of man to con- 
quer and master the elementary forces about him, 
and to guide his conduct in accordance with the 



The Path to God 59 

wisdom and the power of the universe, issuing 
everywhere in waste, calamity, and tragedy! What 
of the dear dead men and women who have loved, 
and erred, and striven, and fallen; who, pursuing 
what seemed to them in their folly, or their inno- 
cence, or their sinfulness to be the one immediate 
and certain way to happiness, yet found the road 
set with thorns, and reached the journey's end 
only to fall pierced and bleeding upon some sharp 
and ugly fact that had been hidden from them by 
reason of their ignorance or their passion ? How 
reconcile the universe as we find it with what we 
should suppose it would be if God were all-wise 
and all-powerful ? Browning finds his solution 
for these perplexing problems in that ultimate 
solving principle at the innermost core of reality 
of which I spoke in the last chapter — 

The love thcit tops the might, the Christ in God. 
He exclaims with Rabbi Ben Ezra, 

Praise be thine! 

I see the whole design, 
I, who saw power, see now Love perfect too: 

Perfect I call thy plan: 

Thanks that I was a man! 
Maker, remake, complete, — I trust what thou shalt do! 

It is Browning's illuminating insight into this 
divine principle of love — conceived by him as the 
back-lying motive of all life and reality — and his 



6o Robert Browning 

rich illustration of its presence and activity in all 
the intercourse of man with man and man with 
God, that gives character and value to his theistic 
conception. Browning realized that for God to 
fail us here would be for God to fail us wholly; 
for the supreme cry of the human heart, beset as 
it is by its sore doubts, temptations, and sorrows, 
is not for a God merely, but for a sympathetic 
God — for a God who feels with us and for us and 
both understands and bears our infirmities. And, 
amid all the wealth of religious teaching and 
the variety of dramatic representations of religious 
experience that Browning provides for us, nothing 
is of so much importance to us as the invariable 
struggle of whatever character he sees fit to depict 
to reach back, through his erroneous, cloudy, or 
partial conception of the God of power and intel- 
ligence, to find the hand and read the face of a 
being whose love and compassion should be com- 
mensurate with his wisdom and authority. The 
Greek Ixion, the Arab Karshish, the savage Cali- 
ban, the Catholic Guido, the Hebrew David, and 
the modern English Browning himself — each seeks 
to find through the shadow, and the thunder, and 
the earthquake, the God of love and compassion — 
the God, not of the head, but of the heart. 

Condemned to eternal torment, Ixion comes to 
see that a loveless god is below the respect of man; 



The Path to God 6i 

and, calmed, enlightened, and purified through 
his suffering, he spurns the divinity which Zeus 
arrogates to himself, and catches a vision of a Pure 
Potency beyond Zeus, in whom reside justice and 
love. In a similar manner the half-brute Caliban, 
as he wallows at ease in a shadowed pool on the 
verge of the sea and communes with himself as to 
the nature of his god Setebos, while able to read 
into his nature only power mingled with envy, 
caprice, and cruelty, perceives a still higher god 
above — the god of Setebos himself — a being pos- 
sessed of a quiet and happy life, and actuated by 
benevolent motives. The alert, inquiring Arab 
physician, Karshish — a theist but not a Christian — 
meets Lazarus, and hears the story of how Christ 
raised him from the dead; and, in spite of his 
scientific temper and habitual skepticism, returns 
again and again with fascinated and half-reverent 
wonder to consider the tale in all its marvelous 
import; and at last, more than half convinced of 
its truth, gives voice to the yearnings of his heart, 
and exclaims: 

So the All-Great were the All-Loving too — 
So through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here! 
Face my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine; 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
And thou must love me who have died for thee!" 



62 Robert Browning 

The only ray of redemptive hope that strikes 
through the gloomy murk of hell that has settled 
over the craven spirit of Guido, the Italian count 
and priest, comes from his tardy realization of the 
saintlike purity and sv^eetness of the young v^ife 
whose soul and body he has outraged, and whom 
he has at last murdered. He has finally been 
brought to bay. The civil and the ecclesiastical 
courts have alike decided against him. He has 
by turns announced himself a primitive religion- 
ist, a hypocrite, and an atheist; but when at the 
end the guard calls to take him to the guillotine — 
as he seeks in terror and frenzy some last foothold 
for his soul as it sinks into the bottomless horror 
of perdition — Browning, in one of the most dra- 
matic and powerful passages in literature, makes 
him cry out: 

"Abate, — Cardinal, — Christ, — Maria, — God, . . . 
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?" 

The principle of unfailing goodness and love 
as incarnated in the girl wife, Pompilia, is the final 
and redeeming ground of religious hope for this 
most execrable of all of Browning's depraved 
characters. 

The consummate dramatic representation of a 
perplexed human heart reaching through the 
wisdom and power of God to feel if haply it may 



The Path to God 63 

apprehend what it counts a higher and supreme 
need — the love of God manifest in terms of finite 
comprehension — is the prophetic leap of young 
David's soul (in his effort to awaken Saul from 
his settled despair) toward the Christ that was to 
bless and redeem mankind. With cunning fingers 
and a skill born of tender solicitude for the great 
king whom his soul loved he touched his harp 
to sweet music, hoping thus to win Saul's spirit 
from its dark wanderings. He sought first, by 
playing the tune that delights the brute crea- 
tion, to awaken in the king's breast the elemental 
emotions that man possesses in common with the 
animals. Then he played the tunes of domestic 
joy and sorrow and fellowship; and, anon, since 
Saul's spirit still hovers on the borderland between 
hope and despair, his voice accompanies the harp, 
and he sings the joys of physical manhood and sen- 
suous delight. Next he sings of endeavor, achieve- 
ment, and renown. But as yet his music has only 
availed to reawaken Saul to a consciousness of him- 
self and his surroundings, and to elicit evidences of 
affection and gratitude for David himself — the 
human friend, the skillful musician. As yet he 
cares not for life, nor finds sufficient motive to 
climb again the heights that lead to joy and 
conquest. So at last David, in the extremity 
of his human weakness and in the fullness of 



64 Robert Browning 

his love for Saul and his desire to hearten and 
reclaim him, yearns: 

"Could I help thee, my father, inventing a bliss, 
I would add, to that life of the past, both the future and this; 
I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence. 
As this moment, — had love but the warrant, love's heart to 
dispense ! ' ' 

Then the truth broke into his soul: 

"I have gone the whole round of creation: I saw and I 

spoke : 
I, a work of God's hand for that purpose, received in my 

brain 
And pronounced on the rest of his handwork — returned 

him again 
His creation's approval or censure: I spoke as I saw: 
I report, as a man may of God's work — all's love, yet all's 

law. . . 
— What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors 

great and small, 
Nine and ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth 

appall ? 
In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of 

all? 
Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, 
That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the 

parts shift? 
Here, the creature surpass the Creator, — the end, what 

Began? 
Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man, 
And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone 

can? 
Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much 

less power, 
To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvelous 

dower 



The Path to God 65 

Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul, 
Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the 

whole ? 
And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest) 
These good things being given, to go on, and give one 

more, the best? 
Ay, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the 

height 
This perfection, — succeed with life's dayspring, death's 

minute of night? 
Interpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul the mistake, 
Saul the failure, the ruin he seems now, — and bid him awake 
From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find him- 
self set 
Clear and safe in new light and new life, — a new harmony 

yet 
To be run, and continued, and ended — who knows? — or 

endure ! 
The man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest to make 

sure ; 
By the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensified bliss, 
And the next world's reward and repose, by the struggles 

in this. 

"I believe it! 'Tis thou, God, that givest, 'tis I who receive: 
In the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe. 
All's one gift: thou canst grant it moreover, as prompt to 

my prayer 
As I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms to the air. 
From thy will stream the worlds, life and nature, thy dread 

Sabaoth : 
I will? — the mere atoms despise me! Why am I not loth 
To look that, even that in the face too? Why is it I dare 
Think but lightly of such impuissance? What stops my 

despair? 
This; — 'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what 

man Would do! 
See the King — I would help him but cannot; the wishes 

fall through. 



66 Robert Browning 

Could X wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to 

enrich, 
To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would — knowing 

which, 
I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through 

me now! 
Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou — so 

wilt thou! 
So shall crown thee the topmost, ineflablest, uttermost 

crown — 
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 
One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath. 
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with 

death! 
As thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 
Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved! 
He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand 

the most weak. 
'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that 

I seek 
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me. 
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this 

hand 
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the 

Christ stand! " 



CHAPTER IV 

THE HUMAN HIGHWAY 

Man knows partly but conceives beside, 
Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact, 
And in this striving, this converting air 
Into a soHd he may grasp and use, 
Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone. 
Not God's, and not the beasts' : God is, they are, 
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be. 

Man, as we have seen, traces his origin to God 
and bears his imprint. Man is the creature, God 
the creator. The mystery of creation Browning 
does not, of course, attempt to explain. He 
reahzes that it does not fall within the province of 
finite intelligence to dispart the intricate threads 
of being that constitute the interrelated life of 
man and God. But he does trace human 
existence to its source in the divine life, and 
does clearly perceive that all finite reality is 
dependent upon God. He is the cause of all; he 
momentarily sustains all; all life issues from him; 
all earthly intelligence centers in him and gains 
its meaning from him; all righteousness, all love, 
is from him. There is, too, unquestionable com- 
munity of life and interest between him and his 

67 



68 Robert Browning 

human creature. Yet, to a degree, man enjoys 
a separate and independent existence. He is not 
coerced in his actions. He is himself a responsible 
being, endowed with power of initiative, and 
possessed in his own right of a nature capable of 
love, and knowledge, and volition. In the long 
run he must answer to God for the use of his gifts; 
but he may contravene the will of God — may 
either grieve or glorify his creator: 



You know what I mean: God's all, man's naught. 

But also, God, whose pleasure brought 

Man into being, stands away 

As it were, a handbreadth off, 

To give room for the newly-made to live, 

And look at him from a place apart. 

And use his gifts of brain and heart 

Given, indeed, but to keep forever. 

Who speaks of man, then, must not sever 

Man's very elements from man, 

Saying, "But all is God's" — whose plan 

Was to create and then leave him 

Able, his own word saith, to grieve him, 

But able to glorify him too. 

As a mere machine could never do, 

That prayed or praised, all unaware 

Of its fitness for aught but praise and prayer. 

Made perfect as a thing of course. 

Man, therefore, stands on his own stock 

Of love and power as a pin-point rock: 

And, looking to God, who ordained divorce 

Of the rock from his boundless continent, 

Sees in his power made evident 

Only excess by a millionfold 

O'er the power God gave man in the mold. 



The Human Highway 69 

The beginnings of man's nature on the material 
side Browning traces to cosmic sources. He does 
not thus make man's physical nature any less 
the product of divine creation, for, as has already 
been pointed out, nature, as well as man, proceeds 
from God. His belief is, simply, that man has 
reached his present stage of existence through 
a long course of development, and that he has left 
his imprint upon lower stages of life, just as they, 
upon their part, foreshadowed in varying degree 
his coming. The earlier creative processes were 
cosmic. But as the world took its upward course 
through shell and leaf and star, through worm 
and bird and fish and beast, there were constant 
prophecies and foreshadowings of man. All 
pointed toward his coming. Had he not later ar- 
rived to crown the creative process, much that 
had preceded him must have deemed fragmentary, 
incomplete, and inexplicable. But now, as we 
spell the record backward, we are able to see 
plainly how 

. all lead up to higher, 

* All shape out dimly the superior race, 

' : The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false. 
And man appears at last. 



God takes time. 
I like the thought he should have lodged me once 
I' the hole, the cave, the hut, the tenement, 
The mansion and the palace; made me learn 



70 Robert Browning 

The feel o' the first, before I found myself, 

Loftier i' the last, not more emancipate; 

From first to last of lodging I was I, 

And not at all the place which harbored me. 

Do I refuse to follow farther yet 

I' the backwardness, repine if tree and flower, 

Mountain or streamlet were my dwelling-place 

Before I gained enlargement, grew mollusk? 

As well account that way for many a thrill 

Of kinship I confess to with the powers 

Called Nature: animate, inanimate, 

In parts or in the whole, there's something there 

Manlike that somehow meets the man in me. 

The fact is, man is still in the making. He has 
attained, as yet, only the first stage of manhood, 
and he is still mounting his endless way back to 
God. He is coming to know; he is gaining in 
power; he is growing in love; but his path to per- 
fection winds in and out round many a mountain 
height as yet unseen, and he has far to go. But 
it is just his imperfection that makes him man; 
discriminating him, as it does, from God, upon the 
one hand, and from unconscious life upon the 
other. And it may be well at this point to remind 
the reader that we now find ourselves upon dis- 
tinctively Browning territory. We have reached 
humanity's battleground; and as we survey it we 
find Browning there, far over upon the verge of 
the enemy's country, dauntlessly setting the slug- 
horn to his lips and blowing full in the face of the 
foe the blast of challenge, of courage, and of con- 



The Human Highway 71 

quest. He was the supreme poet militant of the 
moral life. He interprets human life in terms of 
conflict and struggle. And the conflict is a 
very real one — the issue very distinctly joined. 
Upon the one hand, man finds within himself an 
irrepressible instinct and desire to achieve abso- 
lute perfection. There arises, from within him- 
self, an ideal of conduct and attainment which he 
objectifies, and pursues as the most real and au- 
thoritative interest of life. This criterion of excel- 
lence he discovers to be the life of God in the soul 
— laying upon man the requirement to seek and 
to achieve the highest. But, on the other hand, 
he finds limitations laid upon him by his very na- 
ture as man that render it impossible for him to 
attain his ideal or to bring to completion the im- 
perative behests of his higher nature. He is thus 
doomed to perpetual failure, defeat, and disap- 
pointment; forever driven to seek perfection by 
the workings of God's Spirit within him, yet forever 
drawn earthward and baffled by the restrictions 
laid upon him by virtue of his finite nature. He 
thus finds himself in the condition which Paul 
so graphically depicts in the seventh chapter of 
his Epistle to the Romans: "I find then a law, 
that, when I would do good, evil is present with 
me. For I delight in the law of God after the in- 
ward man: but I see another law in my members, 



72 Robert Browning 

warring against the law of my mind, and bringing 
me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my 
members. O wretched man that I am! who shall 
deliver me from the body of this death ? I thank 
God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with 
the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with 
the flesh the law of sin." 

To most of us the condition of man as thus de- 
picted would seem to be the most unhappy one that 
could be conceived. Why not yield the battle at 
once I we would ask. Is it worth while to continue 
such a hopeless struggle ^ Would it not be better 
to define the limits within which we find ourselves 
able to work successfully, and within those limits 
make such conquests as are within our power ? 
But to Browning such a course would have seemed 
weak, cowardly, and destructive. Such a course 
would be to sink into what was for him the deepest 
and darkest hell of which he was able to conceive. 
Half-hearted endeavor, compromise, surcease of 
effort — these, and these alone, of all the possible 
alternatives that are open to a human being — are 
deserving of scorn and reprehension. His answer 
to such a suggestion is to be found in his arraign- 
ment of the Lost Leader: 

Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, 
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod. 

One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels. 
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God! 



The Human Highway 73 

No, Browning was 

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, 

Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would 

triumph. 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake. 

Indeed, he would say it is just here, upon this 
narrow ledge of human opportunity, with the 
finite abyss of folly, misery, and failure below, and 
the apparently inaccessible cliff of supreme attain- 
ment and fullness of joy above, that man is to find 
his true testing place. Let him fare upward, 
though he repeatedly slip and fall. So long as he 
climbs, utter failure is impossible; for "what is 
our failure here but a triumph's evidence for the 
fullness of the days?" The pedestrian walks by 
perpetually catching himself in the act of falling; 
and in like manner, though in accordance with a 
higher law of attraction, the spiritual athlete makes 
his way toward God by perpetually falling with 
his face toward the goal. And this is the secret of 
Browning's resiliency of spirit — of his joy in con- 
flict — of his abounding confidence in the ultimate 
welfare of humanity. For he sees that, while the 
victory is never completely won, it is always in 
process of being won. God is in the battle. No 
blow is without its effect; and it needs only that 
the earthly soldier grow not weary in welldoing. 



74 Robert Browning 

Those who persevere may rest securely in the 
promise that they "shall renew their strength; they 
shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall 
run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and 
not faint." 

Then, welcome each rebuff 

That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! 

Be our joys three-parts pain! 

Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! 

As yet we need barely to suggest the ground of 
Browning's radiant optimism. We have time zhd 
again suggested that he finds in love the explana- 
tion of all that is dark and perplexing in life, and 
we shall have occasion soon to explain this aspect 
of his philosophy in the light of the same great 
principle. But for the present we need only em- 
phasize his teaching that a man's earthly career 
is simply a testing process — a sort of speeding 
ground for souls — where the spirit militant is to 
be transformed so that it may run a triumphant 
course in newer and higher realms of conquest 
and achievement. This life is preeminently a 
place of probation and discipline. We fit our- 
selves here for a life hereafter. Success or failure 
is not to be judged by the low standards of time 
and sense. 



The Human Highway 75 

Not on the vulgar mass 

Called "work," must sentence pass, 
Things done, that took the eye and had the price; 

O'er which, from level stand, 

The low world laid its hand, 
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: 

But all, the world's coarse thumb 

And finger failed to plumb, 
So passed in making up the main account : 

All instincts immature, 

All purposes unsure. 
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 
amount : 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 

Into a narrow act. 
Fancies that broke through language and escaped: 

All I could never be. 

All men ignored in me, 
This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 

Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter, pathetic- 
ally realizing that his own art was weak because 
he was able to execute all that he conceived, 
cried out: 

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
Or what's a heaven for? 

The heroic old scholar, in "A Grammarian's 
Funeral," felt that he was set here upon earth to 
settle, and settle forever, certain points in Greek 
grammar; and it mattered not to him that, while 
he obscurely labored, youth, fame, and enjoyment 
were slipping through his fingers: 



76 Robert Browning 

He would not discount life, as fools do here, 

Paid by installment. 
He ventured neck or nothing — heaven's success 

Found, or earth's failure: 
"Wilt thou trust death or not?" He answered, "Yes! 

Hence with life's pale lure!" 
That low man seeks a little thing to do. 

Sees it and does it : '' 

This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 

Dies ere he knows it. 

So insistent is Browning for struggle, effort, 
growth, that he makes Hfe one huge Olympic game 
in which spiritual athletes contest for imperishable 
crowns. To attain is, of course, a supreme joy; 
yet defeat is no disgrace; and defeat is always an 
experience that makes for fullness of life, provided 
the contestant renew the struggle. The only un- 
pardonable thing is to refuse to enter the game at 
all. The person who strives, and endures boldly 
unto the end, even though he may have cham- 
pioned the cause of evil, Browning admires and 
praises. For he believes that, whenever and 
wherever good and evil are brought into moral con- 
flict, the good will in the final outcome prove victo- 
rious, and that the sinner will thus be convinced, 
taught, and permanently benefited. It would 
have been still better for him, of course, if he had 
known the good from the beginning and had allied 
himself with it; but he is better off as it is than he 
would have been if he had been quiescent or, desir- 



The Human Highway 77 

ing to do wrong, had refrained because of cow- 
ardice or inertia. So confident is Browning that in 
the end good will vindicate itself, and rise trium- 
phant from the worst struggle into which it may be 
compelled to enter, that he is fond of creating a 
character now and then who dares to try conclu- 
sions with righteousness to the very death: 

I hear you reproach, "But delay was best, 

For their end ^Yas a crime." — Oh, a crime will do 

As well, I reply, to serve for a test, 

As a virtue golden through and through. 



And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
Is — the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, 
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say. 



Each lie 
Redounded to the praise of man, was victory 
Man's nature had both right to get and might to gain, 
And by no means implied submission to the reign 
Of other quite as real a nature, that saw fit 
To have its way with man, not man his way with it. 

We see, then, that Browning's supreme teach- 
ing with respect to man is that human life is a test- 
ing place for our higher powers; that man finds 
within him the working of a power that transcends 
his finite nature — the light of God in the soul — 
urging him on to the attainment of absolute per- 
fection; that this ideal of perfection, while the most 
commanding fact of his life, is unattainable in this 



78 Robert Browning 

world; that, nevertheless, the supreme worth of 
life for time and eternity lies in the strenuous 
and courageous pursuit of this ideal of excellence; 
that the very law of man's being is movement 
toward this standard of perfection; and that, 
ever, as we strive for it, we are in a measure 
attaining it. 

Having now made clear Browning's central 
teaching concerning man, it is our purpose to study 
the various activities of his nature as they relate 
themselves to the realms of sense, of intellect, of 
art, of morals, and of religion; at the conclusion 
of the chapter bringing into clear view the prin- 
ciple or motive that justifies and glorifies such a 
militant nature as Browning ascribes to man. 

THE WORLD OF SENSE 

In his relation to the sense world Browning was 
Christian rather than ascetic. He enjoyed a rich 
and complete life. He entered into its delights 
in no half-hearted way. Says Mr. Dowden: "His 
senses were at once singularly keen and energetic, 
and singularly capacious of delight. His eyes 
were active instruments of observation, and at 
the same time were possessed by a kind of rap- 
ture in form — and not least in fantastic form — 
and a rapture still finer in the opulence and vari- 
ety of color." He could not have been a great 



The Human Highway 79 

poet had it been otherwise; for the material of 
sense impression enters largely into poetry. All 
the concrete details that enter into the imaginative 
work of the poet must originally find their way 
into the mind through the senses; so the true 
poet must be delicately sensitive to the mani- 
fold appeal that comes to him from the world of 
nature. That Browning was finely trained in 
this particular we have already shown in the open- 
ing chapter. There was in him much of the nat- 
ural man, and he frankly enjoyed all sweet and 
harmless experiences of sense. More than most 
men he entered into the purely physical pleasures 
of life. 

As we should expect, though, of a poet of such 
marked spirituality and so strong a moral bent, 
he subordinates the body to the soul. Fleshly 
enjoyments, though palpable and immediate, are 
tainted and disappointing; while heavenly joys, 
though they flit faint and far upon the horizon, 
like the Northern Lights or the glorious mists 
that wreath the autumn hills, are satisfying and 
enduring. For the most part he looks upon flesh 
as a retarding medium in the discernment of truth, 
and as more or less of an impediment to spiritual 
attainment. It not infrequently blinds the mind 
to its highest interests, and sometimes beguiles 
the soul into wrong courses. Its function, of 



8o Robert Browning 

course, is to serve the higher nature. It is the 
CaHban among the human endowments. It must 
play the part of the patient drudge, foregoing its 
own dehghts in the interest of its bright master. 
The body, nevertheless, is not to be despised. 
It is entitled to its own pleasure, and is much 
quicker to learn what is for its comfort and wel- 
fare than is the soul; for it has brief time to taste 
the sweets of life. It is short-lived, so must find 
its gratification at once or not at all. The spirit 
can postpone its education and satisfaction, for 
it endures; but the body speaks the familiar lan- 
guage of lyric poets and of youth; 

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, 

Old Time is still a-flying; 
And this same flower that smiles to-day 

To-morrow will be dying. 

The flesh, at any rate, must in no wise be ma- 
ligned; for in some mysterious way soul and body 
are inseparably wedded here on earth; and even 
in the highest and holiest undertakings of life the 
body is a necessary and worthy ally of the spirit: 

Let us not always say, 

"Spite of this flesh to-day 
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" 

As the bird wings and sings. 

Let us cry, "All good things 
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps 
soul!" 



The Human Highway 8i 

the world of intellect 

The intellect, like the body, requires severe dis- 
cipline. Indeed, I think in the hierarchy of man's 
powers Browning would assign it a rank only one 
degree above sense. It is a good servant but a 
hard master. The intellectual craving within us 
is "a mad and thriveless longing.'* It is like a 
disease in the blood; the more it is gratified the 
more it lusts for further gratification. It has a 
tendency to override all the other interests of man's 
nature, and unless he reins it in with firm hand it 
will bear him to his ruin. If indulged, it becomes 
arrogant and overmastering, destroying at last the 
finer sensibilities of life. At the close of his career 
Paracelsus exclaims: 

No, no: 
Love, hope, fear, faith — these make humanity; 
These are its sign and note and character, 
And these I have lost! 

Nevertheless, the intellect, like the body, has 

its legitimate sphere of action, and in his younger 

years Browning conceived that sphere to be a noble 

one. Intellect is a heaven-born endowment. 

God himself implants within us our restless desire 

for truth, and it is his energy working within us 

that impels us to trace out the laws of the world — 

laws which are nothing other than his organized 

thought. The world is full of wonder, and we 
6 



82 Robert Browning 

can never exhaust the resources of the infinite 
mind nor discover its ultimate mystery. " Keep but 
ever looking," says Schramm in "Pippa Passes," 
"whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and 
you will soon find something to look on! Has a 
man done wondering at women ? — there follow 
men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done 
wondering at men i^ — there's God to wonder at : 
and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, 
old and tired enough with respect to its first object, 
and yet young and fresh suflficiently, so far as con- 
cerns its novel one." Nor need we go far to seek 
truth. If a man would find truth, let him look 
not alone into the face of the heavens and into the 
depths of the earth, but within his own heart as 
well; for we should expect that God would leave 
the deep and indelible print of his own nature in 
the human soul, if anywhere — man of all created 
things being nearest of kin to God: 

But, friends, 
Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise 
From outward things, whate'er you may beHeve. 
There is an inmost center in us all 
Where truth abides in fullness; and around, 
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
This perfect, clear perception — which is truth. 

A baffling and perverting carnal mesh 
Binds it, and makes all error; and to know 
Rather consists in opening out a way 



The Human Highway 83 

Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, 
Than in effecting entry for a Hght 
Supposed to be without. 

The mind builds up its world of truth, however, 
by slow degrees. We do not gain all at a leap. 
Knowledge is more than intuition. It is 

the slow 
Uncertain fruit of an enhancing toil, 
Strengthened by love. 

The growth of the mind is progressive. What 
seems true to-day, to-morrow, in the light of fuller 
knowledge, seems a mistake. We must take half 
truths and temporary truths and make the most 
of them, until, in the more certain light that comes 
from growth and experience, we shall be able to 
rectify and complete our tentative knowledge. 
We catch at mistake as an intermediary device to 
swing ourselves up to certain fact. But what we 
gain we must keep. The most reprehensible 
thing is to step backward from a higher to a lower 
grade of intelligence — having once known, to let 
our truth slip us. 

And this progressive element in knowledge 
should warn us also of the value of the past. No 
man should seek to build his structure of truth 
from the foundation up. He should build upon 
the past, recognizing the value of what has gone 
before, and thankfully utilizing the accumulated 



84 Robert Browning 

stores of knowledge brought down to us through 
the heroic endeavor of the great minds that have 
preceded us: 

Not so, dear child 
Of after-days, wilt thou reject the past, 
Big with deep warnings of the proper tenure 
By which thou hast the earth: for thee the present 
Shall have distinct and trembling beauty, seen 
Beside that past's own shade when, in relief, 
Its brightness shall stand out: nor yet on thee 
Shall burst the future, as successive zones 
Of several wonder open on some spirit 
Flying secure and glad from heaven to heaven : 
But thou shalt painfully attain to joy, 
While hope and fear and love shall keep thee man! 

"While hope and fear and love shall keep thee 
man!" This teaching Browning eloquently reit- 
erates. Knowledge is not to be sought as an end 
in itself. Such a course must always prove ca- 
lamitous. Life possesses other and richer interests 
than the pursuit of knowledge merely for its own 
sake. It is not fair that even the flesh should be 
turned into a veritable drudge in the interest of 
learning. And if Caliban has a right to rebel 
against Prospero, how much more imagination, 
our dainty Ariel, and love, our gracious Miranda! 
No, the standing scandal of human nature is that 
intellect should imperiously seek its own ends at 
the expense of all other modest, sweet, and hum- 
ble interests of life. And, apart from all this, it 



The Human Highway 85 

is impossible that the intellect itself should thrive 
in any such high-handed and haughty course. 
We know only as we live. Knowledge comes 
with action, with love, with fellowship; and 
the intellectual gain that is secured apart from 
the common paths of daily duty and communion 
is barren and delusive. All knowledge that en- 
riches draws its very substance from the varied 
and multiplex life about it. 

THE REALM OF ART 

Art is man's effort to realize and fix in sensuous 
form the loveliness of the universe. To the soul 
of every artist is granted fresh and glorified vision 
of the fair and gracious countenance of eternal 
beauty, and, as best he can, he transcribes for us 
the treasured revelation. Love is the only true 
motive of art. Apart from love there can be no 
stirring, vitalizing, sympathetic art. Whatever its 
character — love of child, love of country, love of 
God — the supreme motive must be the desire to 
confer benefits upon others. All great art is 
wrought in self-forgetful passion. The artist in 
union with the divine essence of beauty in the uni- 
verse and in the abandonment of love for human- 
ity is caught out of himself, and so creates for the 
joy of his fellow men. The virtue and nobility of 
his art is determined by the degree to which he 



86 Robert Browning 

freely and gladly enters into his product for the 
benefit and joy of others. A self-centered art is 
impossible. Humanity must evoke every noble 
strain, and guide every grave or tender touch of 
brush, or pen, or chisel. And when thus swept by 
the creative rapture that works not for personal 
ends, but to the end that the divine nature may be 
revealed to the delight of all mankind, the artist 
finds the very material through which he works 
entering into pliant conspiracy with him to fix his 
idea in fair and faultless form. Nor will the 
artist who sees in love the dominant motive of all 
creative work find any aspect of his theme too 
mean for his hand, or any life too humble and 
obscure to drink joy from his art. Says the poet 
Aprile in "Paracelsus"- 

For common life, its wants 
And ways, would I set forth in beauteous hues: 
The lowest hind should not possess a hope, 
A fear, but I'd be by him, saying better 
Than he his own heart's language. 

But the chief value that comes to us from the 
pursuit of art is the realization that perfect beauty 
and complete fruition are unattainable for man. 
It is the glory of the artist that he is able in 
moments of insight to transcend his earthly limita- 
tions and snatch bright glimpses of the eternal 
radiance; but it is his wisdom not to rest in any 



The Human Highway 87 

partial achievement — not to be satisfied with 
broken fragments caught up from God's rich ban- 
quet board. Let the artist never rest in accom- 
plishment. One's art will perish so, his inspira- 
tion vanish, and he be left thenceforth unvisited 
by heavenly gleams: 

All partial beauty was a pledge 

Of beauty in its plenitude: 

But since the pledge sufficed thy mood, 

Retain it! plenitude be theirs 

Who looked above! 

Art temporarily translates us into the perfect, but 
not that we may rest there. Rather that, through 
failure to achieve the whole, the perfect, and the 
permanent, we may renew our strength for yet 
other and farther-ranging incursions upon the 
realm of the absolute — freshened, and cheered, 
and heartened, to be sure, but never satisfied. 
It is the realization of this truth that so exalts and 
comforts the soul of the musician in "Abt Vogler"; 
the conscious repudiation of it that so depresses 
the painter in "Andrea del Sarto." The pitiful con- 
fession of Andrea del Sarto is : 

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, | 

Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-gray 
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse! 

On the other hand, the words of the musician, 
while full of pathos, are nevertheless vibrant 
with all high hope and achievement: 



88 Robert Browning 

Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared; 

Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too 
slow ; 
For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared, 

That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go. 
Never to be again! But many more of the kind 

As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me? 
To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind 

To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, 
shall be. 

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name? 
Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands! 
What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same? 
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power 
expands ? 
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as 
before ; 
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; 
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good 
more ; 
On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven a perfect round. 

It is in keeping with this characteristic teaching 
of Browning's that he praises the work of the early 
Itahan artists who, after their predecessors had 
long rested in the classic perfection of form that 
came through Greek art, at last renounced slavish 
adherence to fixed models that prohibited all 
growth in art, and sought by strong but crude 
and inadequate means to 

Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, 
New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: 

To bring the invisible full into play! 

Let the visible go to the dogs — what matters? 



The Human Highway 89 

Browning was not, after all, one to "let the 
visible go to the dogs." It was not like him to 
rest content with any half theory of art or any 
radically false notion of the comparative merits 
of content and form — of soul and body. As I have 
already shown, he valued all human qualities as 
inherently good. He realized the value to art of 
all glad, primitive, and spontaneous manifesta- 
tions of life, whether in nature or man. So we 
find him, in "Fra Lippo Lippi," saying a good 
word for close adherence to the physical facts 
to be reproduced in art, for good technique, and 
realistic truth to life: 

Do you feel thankful, ay or no, 
For this fair town's face, yonder river's line, 
The mountain round it and the sky above, 
Much more the figures of man, woman, child, 
These are the frame to? What's it all about? 
To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon, 
Wondered at? oh, this last of course! — you say. 
But why not do as well as say, — paint these 
Just as they are, careless what comes of it? 
God's works — paint any one, and count it crime 
To let a truth slip. 

THE MORAL WORLD 

Browning's predominating interest, though, is 
man's moral welfare, and the key of this he finds 
in service. As we tread earth's highway we mingle 
inextricably with our fellow men. What is our 
neighbor's interest is our interest. What injures 



go Robert Browning 

our neighbor injures us. Our moral nature can- 
not grow and thrive apart from the joys, and sor- 
rows, and struggles of our fellow men. Human 
life with all its stress and strife, its weal and woe, 
is the school in which we are to discipline our souls; 
and it is our happiness and wisdom to take our 
part in the daily routine. Browning has much to 
say about the function of great men in the world; 
but one thing he always makes very plain: our 
heroes can never attain greatness apart from 
their kind. They cannot shower gifts and services 
upon the multitude unless they themselves come 
down and dwell familiarly with the world which 
they would conquer and serve. The poem "Para- 
celsus" eloquently teaches this. As he is about to 
take leave of his dear friends, Festus and Michal, 
to search out all truth, Paracelsus says: 

If I can serve mankind 
'Tis well; but there our intercotirse must end: 
I never will be served by those I serve. 

To this the wiser but less brilliant Festus replies: 

Look well to this; here is a plague spot, here, 
Disguise it how you may! . . . 
'Tis but a spot as yet : but it will break 
Into a hideous blotch if overlooked. 

. . . Were I elect like you, 
I would encircle me with love, and raise 
A rampart of my fellows ; it should seem 
Impossible for me to fail, so watched 
By gentle friends who made my cause their own. 



The Human Highway 91 

They should ward off fate's envy — the great gift, 

Extravagant when claimed by me alone, 

Being so a gift to them as well as me. 

If danger daunted me or ease seduced, 

How calmly their sad eyes should gaze reproach! 

The secret of the expanding moral life, then, 
lies in service to our kind. And service, the poet 
has repeatedly shown us, does not rank as great 
or small. Its virtue lies in doing lovingly and 
well the deed at hand. It is impossible for us 
to know what is great and what is small. Pippa 
and Theocrite wrought not one whit less nobly 
than Queen and Pope. Browning does not esti- 
mate success as most men estimate it. Success 
does not come chiefly through dollars and cents, 
or houses and lands, or fame and earthly favor. 
Defeat in a noble cause outshines the most glorious 
achievement secured at the expense of honor, or 
justice, or truth. 

It is Browning's distinction, though, that he 
refines upon the law of service, and finds the secret 
and motive of all human conduct in the principle 
of love. To the degree that they are wrought in 
love men's deeds ring true. Love is pure and 
self-forgetful. It counts not its own life dear unto 
itself, but pours it out upon the object of its affec- 
tion without stint or measure. Love brightens 
and redeems every path the human foot may tread, 
however sordid, thorny, or polluted. No being 



92 Robert Browning 

who cherishes in his breast the sHghtest spark of 
this unselfish and uncalculating love can prove 
utterly worthless. So long as love persists in the 
soul, hope and faith and God persist there. In- 
deed, Browning holds that man's temporary life 
in the flesh was ordained for no other purpose 
than to teach him the lesson of love: 

For life, with all it yields of joy and woe, 
And hope and fear, — believe the aged friend, — 
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love. 

Let Browning launch his craft where he may, 
sooner or later it finds its way to this measureless 
ocean of love. Whether his bark be a fairy pinnace 
with fluttering pennant and silken sails launched 
upon some quiet rivulet and freighted with fab- 
rics woven in the loom of fancy, or whether it be 
the grim warship, swinging loose from its moor- 
ings in the broad, friendly, placid river, with its 
sullen towers, and guns, and turrets, and death- 
dealing cargo of shot and shell, forged in the fur- 
nace of passion, it is all one. It matters not 
whether we call the craft "Summum Bonum" or 
"The Ring and the Book''; "My Star" or "Sor- 
dello"; "Ferishtah's Fancies" or "Fifine at the 
Fair" — they are destined for the same open sea — 
the keel of each is at last to feel the waters of the 
shoreless ocean of love. 

In the first part of " Pippa Passes " he shows how 



The Human Highway 93 

even the tainted love of a guilty and voluptuous 
woman may, under the influence of a sudden and 
consuming flame of self-abnegation, instantane- 
ously be transmuted into worth and redeeming 
beauty. In " Cristina " he suggests how a man and 
a woman, reading intuitively at first sight that their 
two souls had been wxdded in love from eternity, 
may tread divergent paths — the woman downward, 
the man upward. For the woman, through 
pride of birth and haughtiness of spirit, spurns 
the preordained alliance; while the man takes 
I into his great soul the instantaneous assurance 
that this insight is the sanctifying experience of 
his life: 

She has lost me, I have gained her; 
Her soul's mine: and thus, grown perfect, 

I shall pass my life's remainder. 
Life will just hold out the proving 

Both our powers, alone and blended: 
And then, come the next life quickly! 

This world's use will have been ended. 

In "Confessions" a dying man recalls with conso- 
lation the sweet, mad, illicit love of his youth. He 
has cherished the memory of this clandestine love 
all his days, and now he views it with no regret; 
but, rejecting the minister's words of religious ad- 
monition, he turns to it as the sole influence that can 
brighten his dying pillow. In "Youth and Art'* 
we have the story of high worldly success secured 



94 Robert Browning 

at the cost of murdered love and consequent spir- 
itual atrophy: 

Each life's unfulfilled, you see; 

It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: 
We have not sighed deep, laughed free, 

Starved, feasted, despaired, — been happy. 

And nobody calls you a dimce, 

And people suppose me clever: 
This could but have happened once, 

And we missed it, lost it forever. 

In "The Ring and the Book" Caponsacchi — a 
brilliant, handsome, ardent young monk — under 
a misguided sense of the sacredness and serious- 
ness of his holy office, falls into the sensuous and 
frivolous life common to his class; but, suddenly, 
through his high, pure, and romantic passion for 
Pompilia undergoing transformation into a war- 
rior-saint, becomes a veritable sword of consum- 
ing flame wielded by God's own right arm: 



Sirs, I obeyed. Obedience was too strange, — 
This new thing that had been struck into me 
By the look o' the lady, — to dare disobey 
The first authoritative word. 'Twas God's. 
I had been lifted to the level of her, 
Could take such sounds into my sense. I said, 
"We two are cognizant o' the Master now; 
She it is bids me bow the head: how true, 
I am a priest! I see the function here; 
I thought the other way self-sacrifice: 
This is the true, seals up the perfect sum." 



The Human Highway 95 

Thus it is that Browning makes love the touch- 
stone for all the experiences of life. He traces 
its effects through good report and evil report, 
through success and failure, through youth and 
old age. He depicts the love of man for man, of 
man for maid, and of patriot for fatherland — 
embroidering his theme with endless subtlety, 
variety, and beauty, but always laying stress upon 
love as a supreme moral test. 

THE RELIGIOUS WORLD 

The passage from the realm of morals into the 
realm of religion is but a step; for the energy that 
we have found so persistent in the soul of man, 
urging him to purity, and service, and perfect 
love, is the same energy which, outside and above 
the soul of man, we name God. It is possible for 
the spirit of man and the Spirit of God to be per- 
fectly united in purpose and communion. And 
the common ground where the activities of God 
and man become one is the motive of perfect love; 
for in the last resolve love is the essence of God's 
nature. When he thinks, love is his thought; 
when he wills, love is the product of his will. To 
the degree, therefore, that man thinks and wills 
the good — to the degree that he realizes love in 
his finite dealings — he interfuses himself with 
God; and in the process man not only attains his 



96 Robert Browning 

own highest perfection and joy, but God, too, at- 
tains the ultimate goal of his endeavor. In so far 
as he loves, then, man is one with God. And 
to the degree that he loves he is religious. So it 
IS apparent that there is no wide gulf between 
morality and religion. A man may lay hold of the 
merest shred of the measureless love of God, but 
to the extent that he comes into even this frag- 
mentary relation with this perfect love he is 
religious. Sometimes, by faith, or insight, or the 
purifying power of a great passion that takes him 
completely out of himself, man finds himself in 
absolute accord with God, and there results a sense 
of satisfaction, of surcease, of rapturous quiescence. 
Such experiences come to the best of men but 
rarely. As for earthly loves, they are only fore- 
gleams of the perfect love with which God would 
bless us. The issue of the purest human love 
must needs be 

Infinite passion, and the pain 
Of finite hearts that yearn. 

We have found at last, then, the explanation of 
Browning's optimistic faith that man is in a good 
way and that all must be well at last. The ulti- 
mate fact of the universe is love; and its sway is all- 
comprehensive, and absolutely certain of final 
victory. Pope's assertion that 

Man never is, but always to be blessed, 



The Human Highway 97 

is but a shallow truth. Browning would say 
man ever is and always shall be blessed; for he 
loves, and love is an onward current that never 
ebbs; and borne upon this current humanity will 
at last make its far, fair haven; and meanwhile, as 
it voyages, it will find the course not too rough, 
but glorified by frequent halcyon days and calm 
nights set with stars. 
7 



CHAPTER V 

THE UPWARD MARCH OF NATURE 

He dwells in all, 
From life's minute beginnings, up at last 
To man. 

This chapter deals not so much with Browning's 
artistic treatment of nature as with his philo- 
sophical interpretation of nature. It would be a 
fascinating task to show the various ways in which 
he subdues nature to poetic ends, for it occupies 
an important place in his poetry. For example, 
we might study the precision and accuracy with 
which he depicts form in nature; or revel in his 
richness, variety, and splendor of color; or marvel 
at the manner in which — drenching his mind with 
the inner meaning of some potent aspect or mood 
of nature — he flashes forth its full significance in a 
magic word or flaming line; or admire the art with 
which, upon rare occasions, he brings nature into 
friendly or harmonious relations with some high or 
ecstatic mood of man; or ponder with subdued en- 
joyment his masterful delineation of the vast ele- 
mental forces of nature as they pursue their own 
mysteries or impressive ends in utter aloofness from 

98 



The Upward March of Nature 99 

men and in apparent disregard of their transient 
and petty affairs. But we must forego these pleas- 
ures in order that we may continue the connected 
study of his system of thought. 

Nature in one form or another has been an im- 
portant element in the work of all great poets. 
God, man, nature — these are the interests that 
enter into the warp and woof of all true poetry. 
Usually all three of these interests enter into a not- 
able and enduring poem; though usually a single 
interest predominates in any particular produc- 
tion. Our modern English poets — especially since 
the time of Wordsworth and Coleridge — have en- 
tered into very intimate relations with nature, and 
most of those who have achieved lasting distinc- 
tion have held somewhat definite reflective views 
of the origin, function, and significance of nature. 
Coleridge teaches that nature derives its meaning 
from the human mind; that whatever light, or 
wisdom, or glory nature possesses is read into it 
by the spirit of man: 

O Lady! we receive but what we give, 

And in our life alone does Nature live : 

Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! 

And would we aught behold, of higher worth, 
Than that inanimate cold world allowed 
To the poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd. 

Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth 
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud 

Enveloping the earth. 



100 Robert Browning 

Wordsworth does not accept such a view of na- 
ture — though, for the most part, there was close 
kinship of thought between these two poets. But 
Wordsworth emphasized preeminently the spir- 
itual function of nature; holding that nature is 
alive; that it is dominated by a unitary spirit; that 
it is all but conscious; that it is the direct word of 
God; that it sustains an intimate kinship with man; 
and that it conveys fresh and thrilling messages 
of love and joy and tranquillity to the soul of man. 
Byron had, perhaps, no very clearly defined philo- 
sophical conception of nature, but he sets it in 
sharp contrast over against humanity, and at 
times seeks relief in its moods of calm, or power, 
from poisonous and feverish intercourse with hu- 
manity. He found most satisfaction in its mass- 
ive, elemental, and turbulent aspects. Shelley 
endows certain primitive manifestations of nature 
with a life wholly apart from that of man, and then, 
by an exquisite poetic gift, identifies himself imagi- 
natively with the ancient, remote, and alien crea- 
ture, and causes it to utter its plaint or its chant 
for the delectation of man. Emerson saw in na- 
ture a divine dream — a faint incarnation of God. 
Its function, he believes, is to suggest the Absolute 
to man, and to teach him the lesson of worship. 
As it is inviolable, and untainted by the human 
will, it is a fixed point whereby we may measure 



The Upward March of Nature ioi 

the extent of our departure from God. Tenny- 
son depicts nature in all lovely forms and colors, 
but he does not abandon himself to joyous com- 
munion with it. He does not conceive of it as 
alive, and as going forth in vital sympathy toward 
man, as do most of the other poets I have men- 
tioned. To him the most impressive thing in nature 
is its orderly procedure — its undeviating submission 
to law. His inter,est is almost wholly scientific and 
intellectual, as is well illustrated by the most quoted 
of all his poems of philosophical import: 

Flower in the crannied wall, 

I pluck you out of the crannies, 

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 

Little flower — but if I could understand 

What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

I should know what God and man is. 

Browning has his own definite theory of nature, 
no less original than those to which I have referred 
though naturally in many respects in close accord 
with one or the other of them. Nature, like man, 
is the outpouring of God's creative joy. He enters 
with rapture into the creative process. And na- 
ture shares in this divine joy. All grades of being 
— in proportion to their capacity — rejoice in the 
degree of life that has been accorded them: 

I knew, I felt (perception unexpressed, 
Uncomprchended by our narrow thought, 
But somehow felt and known in every shift 
And change in the spirit, — nay, in every pore 



102 Robert Browning 

Of the body, even) — what God is, what we are, 
What hfe is — how God tastes an infinite joy- 
In infinite ways — one everlasting bliss, 
From whom all being emanates, all power 
Proceeds; in whom is life for evermore, 
Yet whom existence in its lowest form 
Includes; where dwells enjoyment there is he: 
With still a flying point of bliss remote, 
A happiness in store afar, a sphere 
Of distant glory in full view ; thus climbs 
Pleasure its heights forever and forever. 
The center-fire heaves underneath the earth. 
And the earth changes like a human face; 
The molten ore bursts up among the rocks. 
Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright 
In hidden mines, spots barren river beds, 
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask — 
God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are edged 
With foam, white as the bitten lip of hate. 
When, in the solitary waste, strange groups 
Of young volcanoes come up, cyclaps-like, 
Staring together with their eyes on flame — 
God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. 
Then all is still ; earth is a wintry clod : 
But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes 
Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure 
Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between 
The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost. 
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face ; 
The grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms 
Like chrysalids impatient for the air, 
The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run 
Along the furrows, ants make their ado; 
Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark 
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; 
Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls 
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe 
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek 
Their loves in wood and plain — and God renews 
His ancient rapture. 



The Upward March of Nature 103 

All forms of life up to man are perfectly adapted 
by nature for the environment and pursuits for 
which they were created, and each creature takes 
pleasure in the exercise of its functions. There 
has been no failure in adapting means to ends; no 
instinct or tendency has been implanted in any 
natural form without its accompanying means of 
fulfillment. It is only with the arrival of man — 
that is, with the introduction of moral life into the 
scheme — that apparent failure begins; for "a man 
can use but a man's joy while he sees God's." 

If, in the morning of philosophy, 

Ere aught had been recorded, nay, perceived, 

Thou, with the Hght now in thee, couldst have looked 

On all earth's tenantry, from worm to bird, 

Ere man, her last, appeared upon the stage — 

Thou wouldst have seen them perfect, and deduced 

The perfectness of others yet unseen. 

All's perfect else: the shell sucks fast the rock, 

The fish strikes through the sea, the snake both swims 

And slides, forth range the beasts, the birds take flight. 

Till life's mechanics can no farther go — 

And all this joy in natural life is put 

Like fire from off thy finger into each, 

So exquisitely perfect is the same. 

Nor does Browning even here lose sight of love, 
the underlying, always present, motive of his work. 
Even nature, acknowledging the sway of this all- 
conquering energy in the universe, dimly gropes 
toward the perfect day when love shall be enthroned 
over all. God teaches *'what love can do in the 



104 Robert Browning 

leaf or stone"; *'the loving worm within its clod" 
responds to the love of the sun and of the dew; and 
the dumb brute, through some deep-seated instinct 
of love, protects its offspring at the cost of its own 
life. David, the musician, as he went home 
through the night, after his prophetic announce- 
ment to Saul that God's love is to be revealed to 
man through the incarnation of Christ, found 
the whole earth awakened; **the stars of night 
beat with emotion, and tingled and shot out in 
fire the strong pain of pent knowledge." The 
whole universe pulsed in sympathy with the 
message of love which he had divined: 

E'en the serpent that slid away silent — he felt the new law. 
The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the 

flowers ; 
The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the 

vine-bowers : 
And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and 

low, 
With their obstinate, all but hushed voices — "E'en so, 

it is so." 

Browning endows nature with a distinct life 
of its own, and sees in it the creative presence of 
God, but he finds little vital intercourse between 
nature and man. Nature pursues its own mys- 
terious ends without particular reference to man 
or his interests. Nature is vastly older than man, 
and she endures unchanged while individual man 



The Upward March of Nature 105 

decays. Nature and God dwelt together in joyful 
activity centuries before man made his appear- 
ance; and, while man's physical nature found its 
way up to perfection by the cosmic route, along 
with all other material forms, he was assigned, 
with the dawn of his moral nature, a divergent 
path of development which has led him into new 
and higher realms of activity. Nature is neither 
the creation of man's mind, as Coleridge would 
teach, nor is it within the power of nature to enter 
into conscious spiritual communion with man, and 
thus convey to him lessons of wisdom, comfort, and 
strength, as Wordsworth believed. In rare in- 
stances nature and man find themselves in moods 
that are congenial and responsive, and upon such 
occasions nature may weave a magic spell to be- 
guile man, or to heighten or precipitate his human 
emotions; but quite as often she mocks, eludes, or 
disregards him, and busies herself with her own 
alien and elemental affairs. For the most part, 
so far as any vital kinship of interest and com- 
munion is concerned, nature goes one way and 
man another. 

But, though endowed with neither the gift nor 
the desire to share man's moral life and enter into 
spiritual intercourse with him, she is set to instruct 
him and to point him back of herself to God her 
creator. He may see in her life God's loving pur- 



io6 Robert Browning 

pose in all that his power has wrought, and through 
her, also, may be brought face to face with God's 
infinitude. The wise heart will " look through Na- 
ture up to Nature's God." It will rejoice in this 
earth as an incomparable palace of beauty fitted up 
for its probationary stage; but it will not attempt 
to satisfy itself with this one rose flung freely "out 
of a summer's opulence." In this token it will 
read, rather, the desire of God to woo us to the 
paradise in which it grew. 

"Miser, there waits the gold for thee! 
Hater, indulge thine enmity! 
And thou, whose heaven self-ordained 
Was, to enjoy earth unrestrained, 
Do it! Take all the ancient show! 
The woods shall wave, the rivers flow." 

I stooped and picked a leaf of fern. 

And recollected I might learn 

From books, how many myriad sorts 

Of fern exist, to trust reports. 

Each as distinct and beautiful 

As this, the very first I cull. 

Think, from the first leaf to the last! 

Conceive, then, earth's resources! Vast 

Exhaustless beauty, endless change 

Of wonder! And this foot shall range 

Alps, Andes, — and this eye devour 

The bee-bird and the aloe-flower? 

"Does it confotind thee, — this first page 
Emblazoning man's heritage? — 
Can this alone absorb thy sight. 
As pages were not infinite, — 



The Upward March of Nature 107 

Like the omnipotence which tasks 

Itself to furnish all that asks 

The soul it means to satiate? 

What was the world, the starry state 

Of the broad skies, — what, all displays 

Of power and beauty intermixed, 

Which now thy soul is chained betwixt, — 

What else than needful furniture 

For life's first stage? God's work, be sure, 

No more spreads wasted than falls scant! 

He filled, did not exceed, man's want 

Of beauty in this life. But through 

Life pierce, — and what has earth to do, 

Its utmost beauty's appanage. 

With the requirement of next stage?" 

"So, in God's eye, the earth's first stufiE 
Was, neither more nor less, enough 
To house man's soul, man's need fulfill. 
Man reckoned it immeasurable?" 

• ••••• 

"All partial beauty was a pledge 

Of beauty in its plenitude: 

But since the pledge sufficed thy mood, 

Retain it! plenitude be theirs 

Who looked above!" 

In one other way, also, relationship is suggested 
between nature and man, a relationship which, 
however, has less significance for nature than for 
man. I refer to Browning's retrospective enjoy- 
ment of nature's progressive attempts to consum- 
mate its development, and to fulfill hints that it 
had continually sent before, by at last shaping out 
the superior race — humanity itself. As man, 
standing now at the apex of creation, looks back 



io8 Robert Browning 

over the long, slow process by which he reached 
his present stage of life, he imprints his own rich 
and complex nature upon all these fragmentary 
beginnings of life, and casts upon them all "a sup- 
plementary reflux of light" that 

Illustrates all the inferior grades, explains 
Each back step in the circle. 

• ••••• 

Man, once descried, imprints forever 
His presence on all lifeless things : the winds 
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, 
A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh, 
Never a senseless gust now man is born. 
The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts, 
A secret they assemble to discuss 
When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare 
Like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat 
Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph 
Swims bearing high above her head: no bird 
Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above 
That let light in upon the gloomy woods, 
A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top. 
Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye. 
The mom has enterprise, deep quiet droops 
With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour, 
Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn 
Beneath a warm moon like a happy face : 
— ^And this to fill us with regard for man. 



CHAPTER VI 

GOD'S MESSAGE TO MAN 

I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ, 

Accepted by the reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it. 
And has so far advanced thee to be wise. 

Of all modern English poets Browning seems 
to me to be the most distinctively Christian. I 
do not mean by this that his own life radiated the 
life of Christ any more perfectly than did the lives 
of his fellow poets of that generation, or that he 
any more than they took up the cudgels in dog- 
matic defense of his faith. He was not a saint 
when he was at his best; nor, on the other hand, 
when he was at his worst was he a dogmatist. 
In nearly all of his poems that have to do distinc- 
tively with Christianity the artist transcends the 
polemic. What I mean is that, by inheritance 
and habits and the higher necessities of his nature, 
he was from boyhood to old age a Christian 
in every vital sense of that word. 

Both the dogmatist and the so-called liberalist 

have attempted to appropriate him; but neither 

the one nor the other — if loyal to the full import 

of his teaching — has been able to do so with com- 

109 



no Robert Browning 

plete satisfaction. He has left spoken and writ- 
ten words on record outside of his poetry which, 
unless interpreted in the light of his entire life and 
complete utterances, whether public or private, 
seem contradictory. One author, Robert Buch- 
anan, says that when he asked Browning upon 
one occasion whether he were a Christian, Brown- 
ing "thundered, 'No!' " Moncure Conway records 
that, "Browning's 'orthodoxy' brought him into 
many a combat with his rationalistic friends, 
some of whom could hardly believe that he took 
his doctrine seriously. . . . To one who had 
spoken of an expected 'Judgment Day' as a super- 
stition I heard him say: *I don't see that. Why 
should there not be a settling day in the universe, 
as when a master settles with his workmen at the 
end of the week?'" Mrs. Orr, one of his most 
authoritative biographers, in one place quotes 
Browning's own words as follows (a reiteration of 
those of Napoleon) : " I am an understander of men, 
and He was no man." Yet she also states upon 
the opposite page that the poem "La Saisiaz" 
"is conclusive both in form and matter as to his 
heterodox attitude toward Christianity." Mr. 
Edward Dowden, his latest and most scholarly 
biographer, seems to me to place the matter in its 
true light when he says, in commenting upon 
"Christmas Eve": 



God's Message to Man hi 

The central idea of the whole is that where love is there 
is Christ ; and the Christ of the poem is certainly no abstrac- 
tion, no moral ideal, no transcendental conception of 
absolute charity, but very God and very Man, the Christ 
of Nazareth, who dwelt among men, full of grace and truth. 
Literary criticism which would interpret Browning's mean- 
ing in any other sense may be ingenious, but it is not disin- 
terested, and some side-wind blows it far from the mark. 

My own study renders it clear to me that Brown- 
ing was through and through a Christian; but that, 
constitutionally, and in keeping with his whole 
theory of life, he laid less stress upon intellectual 
assurance or finality in his Christian faith than he 
did upon spiritual acceptance of Christianity by 
the whole man, through an intuitive vision of 
Christ's worth, and the consequent loyalty to his 
teachings in the practical conduct of daily life. 
How anyone can carefully read with an open and 
candid mind all that Browning has said and writ- 
ten concerning the Christian revelation, and then 
affirm that he was not a Christian in every legiti- 
mate sense of that word, is more than I can under- 
stand. 

The candid incline to surmise of late 

That the Christian faith proves false, I find; 

I still, to suppose it true, for my part, 
See reasons and reasons; this, to begin: 

*Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart 
At the head of a lie — taught Original Sin, 

The Corruption of Man's Heart. 



112 Robert Browning 

And I, for my part, can find no other explanation 
for the attempt of both orthodox and heterodox 
readers of Browning to twist the poet's utter- 
ances to their own respective ways of thinking 
than that suggested here in Browning's own Hues — 

Original Sin, 
The Corruption of Man's Heart. 

, To complete his general theory of the universe it 
was necessary that Browning should find a place 
for some such revelation of God as we have in the 
Incarnate Christ. God had amply attested his 
intelligence; the evidences of his power, too, writ 
large and clear in all natural phenomena, could 
no more be mistaken than the handwriting on the 
wall of Belshazzar's palace. But his goodness 
showed itself but dimly in the machinelike pre- 
cision of material laws; in the dread power that 
worked man's interest sometimes, but that very 
often, also, worked his destruction; and in the 
tangled web of pain and joy that man was ever 
weaving for himself. The poor half-savage Cali- 
ban conceived of a god who gave evidence of no 
higher motive for the guidance and control of his 
creatures than cruelty and caprice; and it cannot 
be denied that some not altogether humanized 
scientists and philosophers of the nineteenth cen- 
tury found such a conception of God adequate to 



God's Message to Man 113 

their needs. But the typical human heart cannot 
endure the idea of a God indifferent to the weal 
or woe of his creatures. Not even the stout heart 
of Browning could have clung to an optimistic 
faith unsupported by some token that God cares 
for his children. The good Pope, in "The Ring 
and the Book," sums up the issue well as he 
communes with himself concerning the nature of 
God and the truth of Christianity: 

Conjecture of the worker by the work: 

Is there strength there? — enough: intelHgence? 

Ample : but goodness in a hke degree ? 

Not to the human eye in the present state, 

An isoscele deficient in the base. 

What lacks, then, of perfection fit for God 

But just the instance which this tale supplies 

Of love without a limit? So is strength, 

So is intelligence; let love be so. 

Unlimited in its self-sacrifice, 

Then is the tale true and God shows complete. 

Beyond the tale, I reach into the dark, 

Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands: 

I can believe this dread machinery 

Of sin and sorrow would confound me else, 

Devised — all pain, at most expenditure 

Of pain by Who devised pain — to evolve, 

By new machinery in counterpart. 

The moral qualities of man — how else? — 

To make him love in turn and be beloved, 

Creative and self-sacrificing too. 

And thus eventually Godlike. 

There is another reason, also, why to Browning's 

mind an incarnation of divine love in human form 
8 



114 Robert Browning 

was requisite. Grant that man might have in- 
ferred from the love that he found in his own soul, 
as, in the poem "Saul," Browning represents 
David to have done, the assurance that God's 
purposes toward men were benevolent, still how 
vague, remote, and wistful must have been his con- 
ception of God's good intentions! In "An Epistle 
to Karshish" and in "Cleon " Browning gives 
us a dramatic illustration of this very need. Both 
Karshish and CI eon are religious; and both, while 
recognizing the power and intelligence of their re- 
spective gods, yearn for a solution of human pain, 
futility, and limitation — both yearn for a revelation 
of love. But with fine dramatic effect Browning 
betrays each of them into the unconscious irony 
of rejecting the story of Christ's incarnation as a 
tale unworthy of serious consideration. It was 
necessary that God's love should find concrete em- 
bodiment among men, so that in our own human 
way we might clasp his hand, and hear his voice, 
and commune with him, and see in the sufferings to 
which he condescended in the flesh that the pain 
which had been set as a necessary part of our dis- 
cipline was not visited upon us without cost of pain 
to him also; but that, on the contrary, the moral 
outcome was so worthy and so desirable that he 
himself was willing to share our sorrow with us, 
and endure all that humanity must needs undergo, 



God's Message to Man 115 

to the end that we might at last become Godlike 
ourselves. Thus it is that God acquaints us with 
himself, and at the same time supplies us with a 
powerful motive to heroic conduct. For, too fre- 
quently, it is n( t knowledge that we lack so much 
as Vvill; and the earthly presence of God in our 
midst wonderfully avails to reinforce our falter- 
ing purpose and supply us with incentives fresh 
from God. 

'Tis one thing to know, and another to practice. 

And thence I conclude that the real God-function 

Is to furnish a motive and injunction 

For practicing what we know already. 

And such an injunction and such a motive 

As the God in Christ, do you waive, and "heady, 

High-minded," hang your tablet-votive 

Outside the fane on a finger-post? 

Morality to the uttermost. 

Supreme in Christ as we all confess, 

Why need we prove would avail no jot 

To make him God, if God he were not? 

What is the point where himself lays stress? 

Does the precept riui, "Believe in good, 

In justice, truth, now understood 

For the first time"? — or, "Believe in me, 

Who lived and died, yet essentially 

Am Lord of Life"? Whoever can take 

The same to his heart and for mere love's sake 

Conceive of the love, — that man obtains 

A new truth; no conviction gains 

Of an old one only, made intense 

By a fresh appeal to his faded sense. 

But in affirming that the incarnation was vital 
to Browning's theory of life I have stated only 



ii6 Robert Browning 

one side of the truth; for it has become plain to us 
long before this that no smooth path to faith or 
fruition ever met with Browning's approval. He 
would have placed little value upon the truth 
that could be taken up at once and completely by 
man's mind. A truth that admitted of such mas- 
tery by a finite mind must, in the very nature of 
the case, be a limited truth and, therefore, un- 
adapted to the progressive needs of humanity. 
This explains why he prized 

the doubt 
Low kinds exist without, 

and so often lays stress upon the value of a militant 
faith: 

With me, faith means perpetual unbehef 
Kept quiet Hke the snake 'neath Michael's foot, 
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe. 

These last lines came from the lips of the famous 
Bishop Blougram — one of Browning's worldly ec- 
clesiastics. For fear that this may be too strong 
a putting of Browning's own point of view, I quote 
the words of the sublime old Pope in "The Ring 
and the Book " concerning his intellectual attitude 
toward Christianity. He has just been saying 
that he cares not whether the Christian revela- 
tion be revealed as an absolute, abstract, independ- 
ent historic truth, or only as truth reduced to man's 
power of comprehension and adapted to his limited 
mind, and he concludes his meditation as follows : 



God's Message to Man 117 

What matter so intelligence be filled? 

To a child, the sea is angry, for it roars: 

Frost bites, else why the toothlike fret on face? 

Man makes acoustics deal with the sea's wrath, 

Explains the choppy cheek by chymic law, — 

To man and child remains the same effect 

On drum of ear and root of nose, change cause 

Never so thoroughly: so my heart be struck, 

What care I, — by God's gloved hand or the bare? 

Nor do I much perplex me with aught hard, 

Dubious in the transmitting of the tale, — 

No, nor with certain riddles set to solve. 

This life is training and a passage; pass, — 

Still, we march over some fiat obstacle 

We made give way before us ; solid truth 

In front of it, what motion for the world? 

The moral sense grows but by exercise. 

Having explained Browning's general attitude 
toward Christianity, let us consider certain details 
of Christian belief upon which he laid stress. 

THE NATURE OF CHRIST 

We shall find the best statement of Browning's 
belief that Jesus was very God, present for a time 
among men, in "Christmas Eve" and in "A Death 
in the Desert." In "Christmas Eve" we find our- 
selves in the presence of a person very much like 
Robert Browning himself (though it is safest to 
make his acquaintance as a slightly dramatized 
Robert Browning) who on Christmas Eve visits in 
turn — whether in the body or out of it matters little 
— ^various congregations who have assembled upon 
this holy evening to worship Christ — each after 



Ii8 Robert Browning 

its own manner. He first introduces us to a 
vulgar, bigoted, repulsive company of worshipers 
in a dingy, bare, unlovely, nonconformist chapel; 
next, to the prone multitudes who worship through 
the resplendent symbols of altar, and incense, and 
crucifix, and aspiring architecture, and mighty 
music, in Saint Peter's at Rome; and, lastly, to 
the lecture room of a German university, where 
bearded students listen with breathless attention 
to the Christmas Eve discourse of the wan, well- 
nigh celestial, hawk-nosed, high-cheek-boned, 
consumptive Professor. In no case has he found 
edification or been at ease; for he evidently has 
been trained to the services of the Church of Eng- 
land; but in both Zion Chapel Meeting and the 
services at Saint Peter's in Rome, in spite of the 
uncouthness and grotesqueness of the first and the 
display and servility of the second, he has discov- 
ered a redeeming core of faith and love. With 
the devitalized and rationalistic exercises of the 
university lecture room, however, he is utterly at 
variance. With real gusto he gives us an account 
of how the Professor 

proposed inquiring first 
Into the various sources whence 

This Myth of Christ is derivable; 
Demanding from the evidence 

(Since plainly no such life was livable) 
How these phenomena should class? 
Whether 'twere best opine Christ was, 



God's Message to Man 119 

Or never was at all, or whether 
He was and was not, both together — 
It matters little for the name. 
So the idea be left the same. 
Only, for practical purpose' sake, 
'Twas obviously as well to take 
The popular story, — understanding 

How the ineptitude of the time, 
And the penman's prejudice, expanding 

Fact into fable fit for the clime, 
Had, by slow and sure degrees, translated it 

Into this myth, this Individuum, — 
Which when reason had strained and abated it 

Of foreign matter, left, for residuum, 
A Man! — a right true man, however. 
Whose w^ork was worthy a man's endeavor: 
Work that gave warrant almost sufficient 

To his disciples for rather believing 
He was just omnipotent and omniscient, 

As it gives to us, for as frankly receiving 
His word, their tradition, — which, though it meant 
Something entirely different 
From all that those who only heard it 
In their simplicity thought and averred it, 
Had yet a meaning quite as respectable. 

Having thus summarized the discourse of the 
Professor, he addresses himself to battle, with 
sword, mace, and lance, until he mercilessly bears 
his antagonist to earth. He accuses him of ex- 
hausting the atmosphere of truth atom by atom, 
until only vacuity is left. What is retained ? he 
asks. Christ's intellect ? But other voices have 
attested equally well mere morality. Indeed, if 
he were mere man, it was immoral for him to 
represent himself as God. How comes it, too, that 



120 Robert Browning 

a wise, good, and simple man such as you repre- 
sent Christ to have been should have taught so 
obscurely that where one finds the story to be 
mere fable a million take it for actual truth ? 
And why should you, and all of his other followers 
from Peter down, yield fealty to a mere man ? 

The goodness, — how did he acquire it? 
Was it self-gained, did God inspire it? 
Choose which; then tell me, on what groiind 
Should its possessor dare propound 
His claim to rise o'er us an inch? 

If Christ had by his own effort gained such good- 
ness as he displayed, we might praise him with 
pride and joy for teaching us how he kept the mind 
God gave him so pure from fleshly taint or spot. 
We might call him a saint, but we should certainly 
not worship him. Nor should we be one whit more 
inclined to worship him if he held that his gift of 
goodness descended from God. For what good 
gift does not descend from God ? But no richest 
gift, no piling of gift upon gift, can make that 
creator which was at first mere creature. If, then, 
Christ is mere man, with rare endowment, what 
should hinder any holy man so to rise in growth 
and grandeur of soul as to surpass Chris thimself — 

From the gift looking to the giver, 

And from the cistern to the river, 

And from the finite to infinity, 

And from man's dust to God's divinity? 



God's Message to Man 121 

Browning's unquestionable conclusion is that to 
reduce the Christian revelation to a myth is to rob 
it of its authority and splendor. He holds firmly 
to the belief that Christ manifest in the flesh was 
essentially "Lord of Life." 

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A CHRISTIAN 

The sign manual of Christian discipleship is 
love for Christ, and this implies, of course, love for 
all mankind, and loyalty to all for which Christ 
stands. Where Christ is love reigns, and love is 
the only vital tie that connects a Christian to his 
Lord. Christianity is far more a matter of the 
heart than of the head. It is the childlike in 
spirit who finds Jesus, whether a Pippa, a Pompilia, 
a Pope, or a David; but such special pleaders as 
Bishop Blougram and such intellectual aristocrats 
as Cleon have far to go before they can enter 
the inner fold of Christ. It w^ere better, Brown- 
ing thinks, to worship him intelligently than to 
worship him in ignorance, and to wait upon him 
in chaste and beautiful temples, and through 
refined and elevated forms and symbols, than 
to seek communion with him in the midst of 
sordid and vulgar surroundings, or through 
materialistic trappings and superstitious mum- 
meries; for he believes our human best is all 
too poor. But more than all things else he 



122 Robert Browning 

emphasizes the fact that Christ delights to dwell 
with all who love him: 

So he said, so it befalls. 
God who registers the cup 
Of mere cold water, for his sake 
To a disciple rendered up, 
Disdains not his own thirst to slake 
At the poorest love was ever offered: 
And because my heart I proffered, 
With true love trembling at the brim, 
He suffers me to follow him 
Forever, my own way, — dispensed 
From seeking to be influenced 
By all the less immediate ways 
That earth, in worships manifold, 
Adopts to reach, by prayer and praise, 
The garment's hem, which, lo, I hold! 

I will be wise another time, 
And not desire a wall between us 
When next I see a church-roof cover 
So many species of one genus — 
All the foreheads bearing lover 
Written above the earnest eyes of them. 

Do these men praise him? I will raise 
My voice up to their point of praise! 
I see the error; but above 
The scope of error, see the love, — 
Oh, love of those first Christian days! 

Browning keenly realized the difficulties that 
beset the pathway of the true Christian, and the 
sharp temptations that assail him. He was not 
an ascetic, but he was aware that the world is full 
of snares for the foot of the unwary Christian, and 



God's Message to Man 123 

that the flesh is prone to betray the spirit in many 
a crucial hour of life. Nothing could be farther 
from his own conception of the strenuous and self- 
sacrificing character of the Christian life than the 
low, selfish, and relaxing doctrines of the great 
Bishop Blougram: 

I act for, talk for, live for this world now, 
As this world prizes action, life, and talk: 
No prejudice to what next world may prove, 
Whose new laws and requirements, my best pledge 
To observe then, is that I observe these now. 
Shall do hereafter what I do meanwhile. 

I'm at ease now, friend; worldly in this world, 
I take and like its way of life ; I think 
My brothers, who administer the means, 
Live better for my comfort — that's good too ; 
And God, if he pronounce upon such life, 
Approves my service, which is better still. 

No one took more delight in the world that now 
is than did Browning. He knew how to appreciate 
the slightest gift that the passing days plumped into 
his outstretched hand. But he was not blinded 
to comparative values. He rested satisfied in 
no sensuous or temporal gift; but, knowing well 
that all things have been planned for the happiness 
and joy of God's creatures, he accepted the gift 
of the passing hour gladly as an earnest of what 
incomparably greater gifts God has in store for 
his spiritual children. Not for a moment did he 
confuse sensuous values with spiritual values. In- 



124 Robert Browning 

deed, so immeasurably apart in value were the two 
worlds, so strong the seductions of the one as com- 
pared with the more remote but sweeter solici- 
tations of the other, and at times so confusing the 
motives that assailed him as a citizen of both the 
earthly and the celestial worlds, that he would 
gladly have chosen the fiery path of the martyr, 
so that he might once for all attest his unreserved 
and unalterable allegiance to Christ. 

I have denied thee calmly — do I not 

Pant when I read of thy consummate power, 

And bum to see thy calm pure truths outflash 

The brightest gleams of earth's philosophy? 

Do I not shake to hear aught question thee? 

If I am erring save me, madden me, 

Take from me powers and pleasures, let me die 

Ages, so I see thee! I am knit round 

As with a charm by sin and lust and pride, 

Yet though my wandering dreams have seen all shapes 

Of strange delight, oft have I stood by thee — 

Have I been keeping lonely watch with thee 

In the damp night by weeping Olivet, 

Or leaning on thy bosom, proudly less. 

Or dying with thee on the lonely cross. 

Or witnessing thine outburst from the tomb. 



How very hard it is to be 
A Christian! Hard for you and me, 
— Not the mere task of making real 
That duty up to its ideal. 
Effecting thus, complete and whole, 
A purpose of the human soul — 
For that is always hard to do; 
But hard, I mean, for me and you 



God's Message to Man 125 

To realize it, more or less, 
With even the moderate success 
Which commonly repays our strife 
To carry out the aims of life. 

At first you saj^ "The whole, or chief 
Of difficulties, is belief. 
Could I believe once thoroughly, 
The rest were simple. What! Am I 
An idiot, do you think, — a beast? 
Prove to me only that the least 
Command of God is God's indeed, 
And what injunction shall I need 
To pay obedience? Death so nigh, 
When time must end, eternity 
Begin, — and cannot I compute, 
Weigh loss and gain together, suit 
My actions to the balance drawn. 
And give my body to be sawn 
Asunder, hacked in pieces, tied 
To horses, stoned, burned, crucified, 
Like any martyr of the list? 
How gladly! — if I make acquist, 
Through the brief minute's fierce annoy, 
Of God's eternity of joy." 

In "Easter Day," the poem from which I last 
quoted, Browning seems to me to be earnestly 
wrestling with the problem of personal allegiance 
to the Christian religion — the allegiance of faith 
and the allegiance of conduct. The speaker in 
this poem is not the same as the speaker in "Christ- 
mas Eve." He seems to be a somewhat different 
individual in his tastes and predilections. Nor 
must his individuality be confused with that of the 



126 Robert Browning 

poet himself. He has deliberately chosen the 
world. These words, descriptive of him, could 
never have been truthfully uttered of Browning: 

"This finite life, thou hast preferred, 
In disbelief of God's plain word, 
To heaven and to infinity. 

Thou saidst, — 'Let spirit star the dome 
Of sky, that flesh may miss no peak, 
No nook of earth, — I shall not seek 
Its service further!' " 

Christ shows him that while the beauty and the 
wonder of nature, the loveliness of the realms of 
art, the conquests of the mind, the consolations 
of earthly love, are all pledges and foregleams 
of God's good purpose toward him, none of these 
could completely satisfy his soul. That was 
created for infinite love, and could be satisfied by 
nothing else. 

Mrs. Orr asserts that this poem *' refuses to 
recognize in poetry, or art, or the attainments of 
the intellect, or even in the best human love, any 
practical correspondence with religion." I think 
she makes a similar mistake here to the one she 
makes when she avers that "La Saisiaz" is "con- 
clusive both in form and matter as to his heterodox 
attitude toward Christianity." In "La Saisiaz" he 
chooses to face his problem at its worst — to try it 
before a strictly intellectual tribunal. But nothing 



God's Message to Man 127 

IS more evident in the study of Browning than 
that he held the heart to be a better inlet to truth 
than the head; and if he here chooses to make 
battle in intellectual panoply, in right knightly 
fashion, he does not renounce the use of sword or 
dirk if the encounter turn out badly: 

"Mine is but man's truest answer — how were it did God 
respond?" 

And so in the poem "Easter Day" we find Brown- 
ing working under a particular mood toward a 
specific end. He desires to show that the love of 
Christ is the white light that sends its radiance into 
all earthly joys and pursuits, and that all earthly 
attainments or loves are the prismatic colors into 
which this pure light is broken as it passes through 
the prism of the finite soul: 

And all thou dost enumerate 

Of power and beauty in the world, 

The mightiness of love was curled 

Inextricably round about. 

Love lay within it and without, 

To clasp thee, — but in vain! Thy soul 

Still shrunk from Him who made the whole, 

Still set deliberate aside 

His love! 

THE FUTURE LIFE 

Belief in a future life is inwoven with every 
great doctrine that Browning enunciates, and 
shines forth with varying brilliancy from every 
masterful poem that he wrote. His philosophy 



128 Robert Browning 

leads up to it at every point. The soul of man 
cannot be explained except in the light of a con- 
tinuous and expanding life. All fragmentary ex- 
periences, all aspirations beyond our power to 
realize, all hopes that cannot be compassed in 
time, all loves that have been foregone or cut short 
in this life, all apparent failures, all futile attempts 
to attain complete knowledge, point alike to a life 
of perfect fruition. He does not believe that the 
soul can wholly die. It is his trust that in another 
world all error may be mended. If life be bereft 
of the hope of immortality, he looks upon it as a 
poor cheat, a wretched bungle, and he would, for 
one, protest "and hurl it back with scorn." He 
believes that it is not asking too much to require 
that Nature fill the creature full that she dared to 
frame hungry for joy, and with limitless desire 
"to stay its longings vast." 

And although he finds comfort in the revela- 
tion of eternal life through Christ, and in many 
poems gives dramatic expression to his faith that 
Jesus was essentially "Lord of Life," he also fre- 
quently deduces the certainty of a continually ex- 
panding life from the worth of the gift of life as he 
knows it here upon the earth, and the inherent 
necessity of the soul for infinite growth and prog- 
ress. It does not seem possible to him that there 
can be any break in the unfolding life of the soul. 



God's Message to Man 129 

Can there ever be one lost good ? Is it possible 
to doubt that God's power can fill the heart that 
his power expands ? Do not the broken arcs on 
earth require for their completion the perfect circle 
of heaven ? So we find Abt Vogler assuring him- 
self that what is our failure here is " but a triumph's 
evidence for the fullness of the days"; and Rabbi 
Ben Ezra, in the confidence that what entered into 
us was, is, and shall be, merely taking rest in his 
old age before setting forth upon other adventures 
brave and new; and the lover shutting a leaf into 
the sweet, cold hand of the dead Evelyn Hope 
that she might remember and understand their 
secret of unspoken love when she awoke to meet 
him in another life; and Paracelsus upon his death- 
bed expressing his confidence that, though he 
stooped into a dark, tremendous sea of cloud, 
it would be but for a time, since soon or late 
the lamp of God which he held close pressed 
against his heart would with its splendor pierce 
the gloom, so that one day at last he should 
emerge. 

This doctrine of the infinite worth of even the 
meanest and most abject soul that God ever created 
merges also into Browning's optimistic belief, 
or hope, that even the wrongdoer shall eventually 
be reconciled and brought into unison with God's 
eternally beneficent ends. Browning gives fas- 
9 



130 Robert Browning 

cinating treatment to this theme of the ultimate 
weal or woe of the persistent sinner in "The Ring 
and the Book" and in "Apparent Failure," and an 
exposition of these two poems will make his teach- 
ing upon this point sufficiently clear. 

Guido is as detestable a miscreant as man's gen- 
ius can depict. What shall be the ultimate fate 
of such a man ? His saintly girl wife, whom he 
has murdered, thus alludes to him when she comes 

to die: 

We shall not meet in this world nor the next, 
But where will God be absent? In his face 
Is light, but in his shadow healing too: 
Let Guido totich the shadow and be healed! 

Caponsacchi — the brave, noble young priest who 
came to champion Pompilia in her need — desires 
only that Guido be left to slide out of life despised, 
spurned, and execrated by all humankind; until, 
slowly edged off the table-land where life up- 
springs, he shall be lost in loneliness and silence at 
creation's verge — "out of the ken of God or care 
of man, forever and evermore." The great good 
Pope, who gives the edict for his death, does so 
in the hope that 

So may the truth be flashed out by one blow, 
And Guido see, one instant, and be saved. 
Else I avert my face, nor follow him 
Into that sad obscure sequestered state 
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul 
He else made first in vain; which must not be. 



God's Message to Man 131 

We may suppose that, in the words of both Pom- 
pilia and the Pope, Browning gives utterance to 
his own conviction concerning the fate of such a 
character as he has described in Guido. 

In the poem "Apparent Failure" we find the 
poet standing in a Paris morgue, where the 
drowned of Paris are taken for identification, be- 
fore 

The three men who did most abhor 
Their Hfe in Paris yesterday, 

So killed themselves. 

Poor, misguided, bedraggled human wretch, each 
of them! One, a mere boy, dead, perhaps, be- 
cause he could not be a Buonaparte and claim 
the Tuileries for his toy; the second an old man, a 
blood-red socialist and leveler, with his fist still 
clinched in death; and the last, one who had erred 
through women and cards and dice: all three a 
ghastly spectacle of earth's worst wreckage, hauled 
ashore from the Seine and exposed here to be 
claimed. Does the spectacle daunt the poet ? 
By no means. He faces the problem at its worst 
at last, but his faith is equal to the demands made 

upon it: 

My own hope is, a stm will pierce 
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched; 

That, after Last, returns the First, 
Though a wide compass round be fetched; 

That what began best, can't end worst, 
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst. 



CHAPTER VII 

BROWNING'S INFLUENCE 

Ah, that brave 
Botinty of poets, the one royal race 
That ever was, or will be, in this world! 
They give no gift that bounds itself and ends 
I' the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds 
I' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutes 
The man who only was a man before, 
That he grows godlike in his turn, can give — 
He also: share the poets' privilege. 
Bring forth new good, new beauty, from the old. 

The poetry of Robert Browning has come to be 
one of the most potent moral and spiritual forces 
of our age. His influence is steadily growing. 
Although from the first there was present in his 
poetry the authentic note of greatness, he was long 
ignored, neglected, or misunderstood. He was 
compelled to create a taste for his own artistic prod- 
uct; and the English-reading public awoke slowly 
to a recognition of the value and the power of his 
poetry. Scarcely worse than the neglect to which 
he was at first doomed was the adulation he was 
subsequently compelled to suffer. From the 
hands of the dull and indifferent he was betrayed 
into the hands of his friends — the illuminated, the 
seekers after a sign, the specially preordained to re- 

132 



Browning's Influence 133 

celve and to propagate his message. Of late years, 
though. Browning has fallen upon better times. 
More and more the great reading public has be- 
come interested in him. A later generation has 
been better fitted to respond to his peculiar poetic 
methods and to value and sympathetically ap- 
praise the moral and spiritual import of his work. 
The finest essayists and critics of our day have 
seriously and intelligently attempted to esti- 
mate and interpret his work — neither sparing his 
delinquencies nor unduly praising his merits. 
Ministers have popularized his great spiritual 
teachings in sermons and lectures; skillfully edited 
selections of his work have been introduced into 
college courses; lecturers have made his person- 
ality and his characteristic doctrines attractive to 
intelligent lay readers; and literary and social 
clubs of all kinds have studied his poetry in the 
same faithful and intelligent manner that they deal 
with other great writers. The result is that 
to-day Browning is widely read, fairly well under- 
stood, and very potent for good. 

Which will the longer perpetuate the fame of 
Browning— the message which he conveyed through 
the medium of verse, or the excellence of his 
achievement in artistic presentation .? This ques- 
tion has greatly agitated Browning's critics and 
biographers, and has brought on more than 



134 Robert Browning 

one battle above the clouds. My answer to such 
a question is brief. If Browning is read and 
treasured a thousand years from now, it will be 
because his verse contains the essential elements 
of great poetry — truth, beauty, passion: not 
truth written down in hard, cold, intellectual form, 
nor beauty destitute of moral grandeur or spiritual 
significance, nor passion sordid, unregulated, or 
depressing; but truth, beauty, and passion wedded 
and interfused into harmonious and satisfying 
unity. It is utterly impossible to dissociate the 
substance of poetry from its form. No enduring 
poetry — it matters not how sensuous or witching 
its beauty — lives purely because of its perfec- 
tion of technique. Nor, on the other hand, is it 
possible for any thought, however commanding, 
to win permanent circulation in verse without 
some grace of expression to commend it. The 
explanation of this is that no words of haunting 
sweetness ever immortally knit themselves into 
the mystic dance of verse save under the impul- 
sion of some potent truth or vital sentiment; and 
conversely, likewise, it is impossible that there 
should be any thought of commanding value or 
any emotion of transcendent worth that will not 
sooner or later attract to itself, by laws as irresist- 
ible as those of light or gravitation, literary ex- 
pression of such felicity and conjuring power as to 



Browning's Influence 135 

win for it an imperishable place in the souls of men. 
Poetry possesses absolute worth to the degree that 
the great truths and emotions of life have thus once 
for all taken to themselves the vestments of tech- 
nical expression in which it was preordained that 
they should array themselves. A truth once 
adequately spoken is spoken forever. A truth 
not yet made comfortable upon men's lips will 
never cease paining the souls of true poets. 

Now, Browning wrote about many important 
things in a wretchedly bad manner; he wrote about 
some comparatively insignificant things in a very 
happy manner; and wrote about some amazingly 
uninteresting things in an astoundingly annoy- 
ing manner. And I suppose that, if we should 
add together all that he wrote in one or the other 
of these three faulty manners, we should have a 
total of something more than one half of all that 
he produced. So I do not doubt that the vessel 
which carries his fame down to remote posterity 
will, within a century or two, have lightened itself 
of a number of such cumbersome pieces of cargo 
as "Sordello/' "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," 
"Red Cotton Night-Cap Country," "Mr. Sludge 
*the Medium/" and "Jochanan Hakkadosh." 
But how beyond value the argosy with which it 
shall continue its course! What shall we say of the 
priceless gems and ingots, the costly bales and rich 



136 Robert Browning 

stuffs that remain ? What of "Saul/' and "Pippa 
Passes," and "Abt Vogler," and "Andrea del 
Sarto," and "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and "Cleon," and 
"Luria," and "Summum Bonum," and "Love 
among the Ruins," and " Evelyn Hope," and "Two 
in the Campagna," and portions of "The Ring and 
the Book" ? to say nothing of fragments and nuggets 
scattered everywhere in abundance sufficient to fur- 
nish wares for a whole fleet of less ambitious craft. 

My conclusion is, then, that Browning will be 
remembered a thousand years hence not for his 
message specifically, nor his intellectual subtlety, 
nor his new method in poetry, nor his exquisite 
technique. He will be treasured, rather, because 
he has written inimitably upon imperishable 
themes; because he has touched with exquisite 
skill the largest and most thrilling interests of the 
human soul. His fame will not be enhanced by 
his neglect of any detail of artistic beauty; nor will 
it suffer loss because he has chosen to treat the 
higher intellectual and spiritual interests of man. 
The only product that will survive will be that 
in which form and content conspire together for 
the delight and profit of mankind. 

One secret, of course, of Browning's tremendous 
influence lies in his personality. Few English 
poets have had greater original endowments — 
more force and independence of character. His 



Browning's Influence 137 

personality was symmetrical and well-rounded, 
too. He was alive at every point, and was con- 
tinually in full possession of his powers. His 
senses were alert and penetrating. He saw quickly, 
and saw accurately and deeply. His intellect 
was at once penetrating, tenacious, and versatile. 
He was curious about everything, and he forgot 
nothing. He was clever to a degree, yet side by 
side with prankish, roguish, dare-devil qualities 
of mind we find sanity, balance, and seriousness 
that suggest comparison with the greatest minds 
that ever busied themselves with poetry. Un- 
like many of the most gifted and brilliant British 
poets, Coleridge, Burns, Byron, Shelley, he was 
able to bring all the riotous and varied tendencies 
of his genius under the control of his will. What 
volcanic upheavals of sense, or contrary winds of 
passion, or false lights of intellect he had to con- 
tend with, it is impossible to estimate. That he 
had to battle fiercely with such experiences we 
cannot doubt. But Will was a steady helmsman 
upon whom he could rely. His sympathies were 
catholic, responsive, and humane; his emotional 
interests and susceptibilities world-wide. His soul 
vibrated like an ^olian harp to every wind of 
feeling that stirs the world of human hearts. He 
was insensible neither to the humor nor the 
pathos of life. His humor was more robust and 



138 Robert Browning 

high-spirited than penetrating and delicate; his 
pathos was manly, restrained, and free from sen- 
timentality. His supreme passion was for the 
imperishable things of the Spirit; and, as we have 
seen, his great poems are those that deal with the 
crucial experiences of men and women when they 
are brought face to face with choices that are to 
affect their welfare, for weal or for woe, through- 
out time and eternity. He has, finally, an origi- 
nality and power of imagination that lifts him 
at times into the highest realms of creative work, 
enkindling, harmonizing, and glorifying all of his 
other endowmeiits, and issuing in perfect produc- 
tions of art. 

A quality of Browning's temper that commends 
his poetry to rugged and serious natures is his 
faithfulness to facts; his courage in facing all the 
issues of life. Though an optimist and a roman- 
ticist he was endowed with a robust common 
sense and downright honesty that made it impos- 
sible for him to ignore or evade reality. Indeed, 
this temper has been characteristic of nearly all 
his great contemporaries. They have all been 
earnest and serious men whom nothing could sat- 
isfy save the sternest reality. From Wordsworth 
down they have had a passion for verities and an 
unmistakable contempt for sham and pretense. 
Cost what it might, they have insisted upon press^ 



Browning's Influence 139 

ing home to the very heart of truth. *^To look 
steadily at the object" is the way Wordsworth 
phrases it. Carlyle declares that it is the duty of 
the hero to bring men back to reality, "to force 
them to penetrate beneath the surface, to teach 
them to stand upon things and not upon the shows 
of things.'' Ruskin insists upon utter faithful- 
ness to nature and demands that the artist reject 
nothing, select nothing, scorn nothing. The re- 
sult has been that Browning, in common with the 
other great writers of the nineteenth century, has 
unflinchingly faced, and fearlessly accepted, the 
problems' of science, the problems of social life, 
and the problems of the moral consciousness. 
Never before in the history of literature have the 
consequences of moral infirmity been set forth 
with such inevitable force, neither have the darker 
and more terrifying aspects of the moral and 
religious life been so resolutely confronted, so re- 
morselessly analyzed, as by George Eliot, Nathan- 
iel Hawthorne, and Robert Browning. No specter 
of the soul has been allowed to pass without chal- 
lenge, no lurking spirit of doubt or despair that 
has not been tracked to its den and dragged into 
the open light of day. 

Be it said, then, to his praise that he did not 
"stand upon the shows of things," but pressed 
inward until he found firm footing upon things 



140 Robert Browning 

themselves. He found that there was no reality 
save spirit. He found that the abiding and uni- 
versal interests of the human race have been its 
faiths, and loves, and joys, and aspirations. And 
was he not correct in his findings ? What has 
life offered so absorbingly and perennially real 
as these ? What man is a stranger to them, or 
indifferent to them ^ The interests that have been 
most constant and universal have not been of the 
earth, earthy. Men have most tenaciously set 
their affections upon things which are above, not 
upon things which are upon the earth. Cold and 
hunger, cord and gibbet, flame and torture, have 
seemed less real to the human race than have love, 
and faith, and hope. And ten thousand times over 
has this been proven by hero and saint, by devoted 
mother and inspired philosopher; for the real is 
the spiritual, and spirit plumes its wings to try 
immortal worlds. 

Browning's great poetry thus habitually touches 
life at its highest points. He appreciates justly 
the values of life and lays the stress where it should 
be laid. If we compare his poetry with the poetry 
of Byron, and Keats, and Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. 
Stephen Phillips, we do not affirm that their poetry 
is bad and that his is good. It is a matter, rather, 
of good poetry and poetry that is much better. 
For the poet who feeds our higher nature is the 



Browning's Influence 141 

poet who claims our deepest gratitude and affec- 
tion. We do not reject the song that makes the 
blood dance faster through our veins, or the lyric 
that thrills us with its sensuous beauty, or the ro- 
mantic tale that fills up some painful or lan- 
guorous hour, or the ode that sometimes, lapping 
our spirits in forgetfulness or summer dreams, 
brings us welcome reprieve from life's "sore spell 
of toil." But our unstinted and undying gratitude 
we reserve for the poet who, finding us disconso- 
late, comforts us; who, finding us disheartened and 
ready to yield, sounds the note of advance for us; 
who, finding us recreant to our trust and disloyal 
to our aspirations, uncovers for us once more the 
ideal that has been temporarily obscured. It is he 
who stays our feet amid the whirling waters of 
temptation; v/ho sets the stars of faith and love 
and hope in our benighted sky, and who whispers 
to us in our lonely and nerveless moments of 
despair the heartening message of God and im- 
mortality. And all these Browning does. He is 
a good Samaritan to us in our need. 

He does more than this. He does what all 
great poets and prophets do — stirs within us, some- 
how, a new and larger sense of life. He reclaims 
in some measure the waste places of existence 
and arouses sluggish hearts to a realization of un- 
guessed capacities. Rejecting outworn and exter- 



142 Robert Browning 

nal standards of authority, our poets and seers 
seek their inspiration from within, and create new 
worlds according to the deep instincts of their own 
nature. The indescribable charm and potency 
of these great spirits lie in the fact of their clear 
perception and vigorous affirmation of an ideal 
universe, a world invisible to fleshly eyes and 
intangible to fingers of earth, yet immeasurably 
more real than any that has ever attested itself to 
the five senses. All men at some time, and some 
men at all times, feel themselves to be a part of 
such an imperishable spiritual order; but to most 
of us, weak, proud, ignorant men that we are, come 
only stray flashes of light and hazy adumbrations 
from those truths that forever live for us, yet for- 
ever elude us. But to our poets and prophets has 
been granted the steady and penetrating gaze that 
sees from center to circumference. Our poets 
have been men of faith and men of vision, and 
without fear or guile they have given us accurate 
transcripts of reality as it has appeared to them. 
"Philosophy," says Emerson, "is still rude and 
elementary. It will one day be taught by poets. 
The poet is in the natural attitude — he is believing; 
the philosopher after some struggle having only 
reasons for believing." This has been true of Em- 
erson himself, and has been no less true of Brown- 
ing. Sane in intellect and true at heart, he 



Browning's Influence 143 

implicitly trusted the deeper instincts of his being, 
and, unhampered by dogma, custom, or tradition, 
viewed the world and the problems of life in fresh 
relations. He looked upon life as its own inter- 
preter, and deemed it as human, as essential, and 
as much a discovery of the real, to love, to will, to 
trust, and to aspire, as to know. He pointed men 
to God as the ground of all being; asserted the 
inalienable worth and dignity of the human soul, 
and affirmed those fundamental instincts and 
promptings 

which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain hght of all our day, 
Are yet a master light of all our seeing. 

And, finally, more convincingly and adequately, 
I think, than any other poet ever did it, he set forth 
all that is involved in the Christian religion. To 
the fact that his poetry is saturated with the Chris- 
tian idea is due, in large measure, its stimulating, 
enlarging, and life-giving quality. He was a 
Christian by the necessities of his nature. As we 
have seen, his starting point was ever the human f 
soul. He perceived in man's life such vast worth, 
dignity, and significance that he felt obliged to 
study and interpret it in the light of some truth or 
hypothesis adequate to explain its infinitely rich 
possibilities and implications. His vision of the 
infinite value and promise of human life was 



144 Robert Browning 

immediate and convincing. How account for its 
value and provide for the perfect development of 
its capabilities ? 

Christianity, and Christianity alone, solved this 
question for Browning. He found in Christ all 
that his nature sought. The humanity of Christ 
met and responded to his humanity; the divinity 
of Christ afforded him the necessary connecting 
link with the infinite and the eternal. So we find 
Browning's philosophy of life through and through 
a Christian philosophy of life. He teaches that 
service is the pure gold of this life, and that it mat- 
ters little into what denomination it be coined if 
only it be kept in circulation. He asserts that the 
human spirit can never satisfy itself save with the 
perfect and imperishable. He shows that progress 
and growth are essential to man's nature; and that, 
therefore, he must not expect in this earthly life 
to find full satisfaction for either mind or heart. 
But he assures him of conscious immortality and 
endless progress in the world to come; and teaches 
that there is an ineradicable religious instinct with- 
in all men that prompts them to seek God: 

Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, 

A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 

A chorus-ending from Euripides, — 

And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears 

As old and new at once as nature's self. 

To rap and knock and enter in our soul, 



Browning's Influence 145 

Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, 
Rotind the ancient idol, on his base again, — 
The grand Perhaps! We look on helplessly. 
There the old misgivings, crooked questions are — 
This good God, — what he coiild do, if he would. 
Would, if he could — then must have done long since: 
If so, when, where, and how? some way must be, — 
Once feel about, and soon or late you hit 
Some sense, in which it might be, after all. 
Why not "The Way, the Truth, the Life"? 

He believes, too, in the power of the practical 
reason to will the truth when the scales of specula- 
tive reason balance — inclining neither way; and 
with unwearied zest and unfailing beauty he as- 
serts his belief in God's boundless love and good 
will toward men. 

He accepted the life and teachings of Christ as 
adequate, authoritative, and supreme in the spir- 
itual realm; held that his system of morals far out- 
shone the wisest philosophies of earth; and found 
in his example and utterances such moral in- 
centive and life-giving power as attested his 
authentic divinity. And he gave expression to 
this faith with moving effect throughout his 
poetry. He loved and worshiped Christ as well 
as trusted him; so his pages frequently glow 
with spiritual fervor and emotion. His faith 
was the robust expression of his whole manhood, 
and was so strong and assured that he is able to 

seize the groping hands of weaker men and draw 
10 



146 Robert Browning 

them up to where he has himself found firm ground 
for his feet. We feel that it is the strong faith and 
conviction of Browning himself that wings with 
fiery energy the words of the worldly (though not 
altogether unbelieving) bishop to his skeptical 
interlocutor: 

Once own the use of faith, I'll find you faith. 

We're back on Christian groiuid. You call for faith: 

I show you doubt, to prove that faith exist 

The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say, 

If faith o'erconaes doubt. How I know it does? 

By life and man's free will, God gave for that! 

To mold life as we choose it, shows our choice: 

That's our one act, the previous work's his own. 

"What think ye of Christ," friend? when all's done and 

said, 
Like you this Christianity, or not? 
It may be false, but will you wish it true? 
Has it your vote to be so if it can? 
Trust you an instinct silenced long ago 
That will break silence and enjoin you love 
What mortified philosophy is hoarse. 
And all in vain, with bidding you despise? 
If you desire faith — then you've faith enough: 
What else seeks God — nay, what else seek oturselves? 



NOV 90 1906 



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